


For a Thousand Years

by mtjester



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Final Battle, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-06-05 13:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6705757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtjester/pseuds/mtjester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suddenly, the black hole that sits waiting in your subconscious explodes open again. Something is on the other side, and it wants you to <em>know</em>, and it wants you to <em>remember</em>, and you’re overcome by that desperate nostalgia that you’re beginning to feel too much. Oblivion is at your feet. Hands are on your heart, ready to tear it apart. And despite it all, you look at Tavros sitting across from you, and you picture him eating in your apartment, and outside, it’s night, and you can hear the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Colors and Promises

**Author's Note:**

> [Recommended listening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtOvBOTyX00)
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> This fic follows the headcanon that the kids can and do age in the dream bubbles according to their projected image of self and feelings about their own maturity (similar to the mechanics set up in [The Irony of Bubblemates](http://archiveofourown.org/works/199146/chapters/294725))--characters are not underage.

It’s not the first time the two of you have run into some other version of one of yourselves—younger, older, with or without an entourage or an unexpected significant other or some baggage that follows them around the dream bubbles, haunting them even in death. But this time is different. This Tav’s rocking a pirate-esque bandana and a pair of booty shorts that make your own Tav grimace, but the guy’s got a sense of purpose and determination that’s not lost on either of you. Your Tav’s interest is immediately piqued—it’s not every day you run into a version of him with such a palpable go-getter attitude, especially one so young—and he goes over to have a chat. You watch them exchange greetings, make small talk, converse about this or that, and the little Tav tightens his fists, and your Tav furrows his brow, and your gut starts to sink as glances are thrown your way. Something about the way your Tav nods and turns back to you as the other Tav flies away makes you stuff your hands into your pockets and curl your fingers into the cotton lining. You hide your frown as Tav sidles up to you. Tav tries and fails to hide his apprehension.

“What’s up?” you ask.

“Uh,” he says, biting his lip. “That was the sort-of Alpha me, from before the, uh…”

“Before John threw a middle finger to paradox space and rewrote the timeline?” The gossip these days just keeps getting wackier, but that’s not your business anymore. Alpha You can deal with John’s reality-altering time shenanigans.

“Yeah,” Tav says with a nod. “He’s, uh…he’s gathering an army, for the purpose of fighting Lord English in an epic final battle, hopefully to defeat him definitively, and to rid paradox space of his horrible violence.”

“An army?” you repeat.  “An army to fight Lord English.”

“Uh…yeah. And…he was asking if we would join, as part of…”

“The cannon fodder.”

“Well, he didn’t put it that way, exactly.”

You inhale through your nose and look up at the shattering sky. The cracks glow, creak, and splinter over and around your bubble, making you feel more than anything like a miniature Dave figurine trapped in a doomed snow globe. Tavros follows your eyes and examines the sky as well, and when you glance at him, the damning rainbow fissures are reflected in his dead eyes. He looks as anxious as you feel.

You know things can’t continue this way. Reality can’t sustain this kind of onslaught. Even the warped kind of reality you and the rest of the dead inhabit.

“Hey, let’s head inside,” you say. “We got time to think about this.”

“Okay,” he says.

Climbing the stairs to your apartment, you try to think back to a time when the sky wasn’t exploding into technicolor glass shards. You remember the first time it happened. You were both outside, enjoying another day in your post-mortem paradise, when the boom sounded and the gash broke like lightning across the horizon. Now, it feels like it was always there. The Furthest Ring is fucked up that way. Time means nothing. You can remember the starts and the finishes and the beginnings and ends, but at the same time, everything is always the way it is now, and the way it was then, and the way it will be. It fucks you up. What good is a time guy without any discernable logic guiding time?

Something about those cracks, though. When they appeared, they made it pretty damn clear that it was the beginning of the end. And they’re making it pretty damn clear now that you can’t just sit in your bubble with your dorky boy-matesprit-friend drinking AJ and shooting the shit for the rest of eternity like you once thought you could. You haven’t escaped Sburb, or Skaia, or horrorterrors, or the slow, unending march of paradox space forcing you to bend to its eternal will, even in death.

You open the door to your apartment and pause in the threshold, hand on the doorknob, staring at the fake reflection of the life you had when you were alive, combined here and there with dream memories of Tavros’s past. You’ve gotten used to the weird half-childhood, half-alien aesthetic in the years or months or decades or whatever you’ve been dead. You started to really appreciate your new life post-life. But it’s a fake life outside of a real game that’s still happening around you. Lord English is still your problem. Even in death.

“Dave?” Tavros says behind you. He places a hand on your back and nudges you inside. He closes the door. He stands with you.

“An army, huh,” you say.

“We don’t have to join,” he says. “He was just extending the offer. In case we wanted to fight and do important things again.”

“Bullshit. Who the hell wants to double die out in the middle of nowhere? He might as well start up a draft if he wants to flush out their front lines. Fuck, next thing you know, they’ll be drawing names out of a hat and we’ll be dreaming up handguns to shoot ourselves in the foot. We should get ready to conjure up a fake dream Canada where we can go to escape our patriotic duty until the Powers That Be offer us pardon years after the war has ended. I’ve never been to Canada, but it can’t be that much different from Texas. Where do troll deserters go when they don’t wanna join the troll army?”

“Uh…we mostly just die horribly if we do that,” Tavros says.

“Oh, right,” you say. He grew up on this do-or-die bullshit. It’s just you here, then.

“…Dave? We don’t have to. It was just an offer.”

You inhale. Something heavy settles in your chest. “Yeah, well. It’s not like there’s actually ever gonna be a dream Canada out here to run to anyway. We might have to take the troll route on this shit.”

“So…?”

“So we do, we die, and we don’t, we probably die. What’s going to happen to all this once shit hits the fan?”

You gesture to the room, and Tavros glances inside, over the tv, the posters, the games, the turntables, his stuff and yours, his life and yours.

“Maybe…the dream bubbles will be safe again, once we defeat the evil? Should we ask Aradia?”

“I dunno, bro. Maybe.”

“Well…we’re kind of dead anyway, right? That’s been a thing, for a while now. We were unusually lucky to have the dream bubbles at all after we died, and to have this time to be happy and generally pretty carefree, even if it had to end eventually.”

God. Fuck. You don’t wanna think about this shit. To have your life and afterlife laid before you for examination, to nod and say, ‘Yep, that was nice. Worth it. Had a good time there. 8/10, would do over, maybe with a few changes in the upbringing if push came to shove about it.’ It was hard enough the first time when you were actually alive, prepping for the godtier death you never actually got to experience. Well, you got the death part, at least. Alpha You got the godtier.

Being dead, though, and with Tavros, looking back and appreciating the time you had is different. Everyone knows they’re going to die when they’re actually fucking alive. It’s one of those little things that prod at your mind every now and then, reminding you, ‘Hey, bro, mortality is still a thing and it’s all gonna end someday.’ Once you were in the game, you could hardly avoid thinking about your own mortality, what with the constant threat of Dead Daves cluttering up the timeline. Hell, you fucking _are_ one of the Dead Dave reminders of death. You’re your own _momento mori_ , in the flesh, except less flesh and more ghost. Ghostly flesh. Real enough, but not quite real enough.

When you died and realized you had another crack at living—dead living—things got weird. Being dead, dying wasn’t really on your mind so much. It felt like time would go on forever, that you had a whole fucking eternity to do everything you didn’t even know you wanted to do while you were alive. Suddenly, dead you had a dead friend that turned into a dead lover who helped you be less dead uptight about all the insecurities you had picked up while living. Dead you could relive memories from your alive past but with someone who loved you, surrounded by someone who loved you, full of love for someone who loved you. Dead you was dead safe and dead happy. And so was Tavros. Just look at your fucking apartment. It’s you and him, mixed up in a memory bubble until the memories blur together and are made better for it.

You once thought about asking Rose—dead or alive version, who fucking cares—to hypnotize you into remembering different memories. You’re pretty sure that’s a thing that can happen. The right sleight of hand and trick of mind can create all sorts of false memories to replace the ones that are real. Not the good ones you had, populated by Rose and John and Jade, but the shitty ones. Hell, who cares anymore if it wouldn’t be real? You’re not real, and neither is Tavros, and you both have enough shitty memories between the two of you that a little hypnosis probably couldn’t hurt. You could dream up a memory of a nice, fake family, something the two of you could raise together, like you could’ve done if you weren’t both so dead and trapped in your collective pasts. With an eternity ahead of you, you reasoned, why the fuck wouldn’t you want to try to make an actual, somewhat viable future out of the redundant materials provided to you by your own lived experiences? You could pretend that you were real and alive and totally not chained like a prisoner to the life you lived before you died. And you and Tavros could be a real couple, with a real existence beyond the two pasts you ended up slamming together unceremoniously in your living room.

But that was then. With paradox space time the way it is, you can hardly remember what it felt like to feel like you have forever. Now, it feels like Lord English was always here, shattering reality around you. It feels like the cracks were always in the sky, creating a disco out of your dreams. And a real future is coming on, and it’s definitely not made out of your past, dead or alive. It’s made out bullshit you were really hoping Alpha You could have all to himself.

You took eternity for granted. In the blink of an eye, at any moment, paradox space could break. Everything could disappear. Past, present, future, time and space, like it was never there at all. Or like it was always there, and always will be there, but you won’t be in it anymore. Will this exact ghost version of you matter? All of your post-mortem growth, your slow realizations, your slip on your ego-defensive irony, and your embrace of the things you really, truly love? And this Tavros, will he matter, too? This Tavros, the Tavros that knows you so well now, the Tavros you know so well, whose long stay and shared experiences with you has made a fucking difference on the version of you you’ve become? Will Paradox Space record this you interlacing yourself with this Tavros in this apartment, the two of you kicking each other asses at fiduspawn and glitchy racing games, mixing beats and writing raps, laying on your bed while your fan blows sweat and heat off your bodies, talking and kissing and talking?

Will any of this matter? Will any of this fucking _matter?_

“Dave?” Tavros says quietly. You wish you had recorded more of his voice. Maybe if you throw one of the mixtapes you both made together as hard as you can into the void, someone real will catch it and know you mattered. You reach out and grab his hand, smooth your thumb over his ghost skin that feels so fleshy and solid to you.

“Hey,” you say. “Are we gonna do this, then?”

“I think…given the situation, we don’t have a choice. Or that we do have a choice, but one of the options would be objectively bad, and we know which one we have to choose.”

You let out a small and empty laugh. Way to say it exactly so you can’t avoid the reality of the situation. “Right,” you say.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“This ain’t a fight we can guarantee we’ll survive,” you say.

“Uh, well…every fight I ever fought wasn’t one I could guarantee I’d survive, so in that case—”

“Man, don’t start saying shit like that. You’re gonna freak me out.”

“Oh, yeah…sorry.”

Don’t think about it, you tell yourself. Don’t think about multicolored beams of destruction and flesh incinerating to ash off of bones, don’t think about the unimaginable lack of existence that true death is supposed to be, don’t think about the horrible emptiness of losing a part of your afterlife that you had once thought you would have for a literal eternity. Thinking about all the things you shouldn’t think about makes your heart ache and your limbs go cold, and you take a step into Tavros to feel something solid and warm and vital. He wraps his arms around you. You snake your arms under his and squeeze, and he squeezes you back.

“Are you scared?” he asks. He wants you to be honest. Opening your mouth and trying to push the words out makes your heart clench, but you get there.

“Yeah, bro. We got a sweet thing going for us, you know?”

“Yeah. Uh…um,” he says. He squeezes a little tighter. “Thanks, for letting me be a part of your afterlife.”

God, what a goober. ‘Thanks’? Is that where you’re at now? Expressing gratitude? Or is it appreciation? Fucking ‘thanks,’ like what you say to someone after they feed you or let you crash at their house or do you a favor, and now it’s over, and you’re moving on, but you want to let them know that it meant something to you? Fucking _‘thanks_.’ You choke back a laugh, or a sob, or maybe something that’s not quite either of those things. You kiss his ear, card your fingers through his hair. His cheek brushes against yours as he turns his head towards you, and you feel his lips against your jaw.

If you could summarize everything you want to say, it wouldn’t be ‘thanks.’ But it wouldn’t not be ‘thanks,’ either.

His lips finally find yours, and you try to press words into his mouth that you don’t think actually exist. You transfer them from your tongue to his in a desperate, wordless speech. Body language is all you have for this kind of message. His hands slide under your shirt and up your back, his thumbs on your sides, feeling very real and familiar and urgent. You get a solid grip on one of his horns, and your other hand traces his jaw. You press your whole body into him. You want to brand the two of you together into a reality that’ll stay after the end of your existence. You’re afraid this is the last time you’ll feel him exist so completely, so within your reach. You’re fucking afraid of being alone, anchorless, meaningless, unreal. You don’t want everything to disappear.

He takes a step back and sits down on the futon, almost like he can feel you losing your poise. Your shirt comes off as you straddle him, and before you can sit back on his lap, he pulls your stomach to his mouth, hugging your hips. You cup his head as he presses kisses into you, burying his face into the taunt muscles of your belly. He’s trying to get lost in you, too. You wrap your arms around his head and hug him, and he starts making his way up, peppering your ribs with kisses, trailing his hands up your back. He loosens his grip enough to let you sit back and presses his tongue against your nipple. He knows you fucking love that. You arch your back and roll your hips against his lap, and you can hardly stand it when his teeth graze the hardened nub. You grab him by the hair and pull his head back so you can kiss him. He takes off your shades. You look down into his white, dead eyes, and he looks up into yours, both of your faces flushed and hot and bittersweet. You undo the snaps on his shirt so you can pull it over his head, and you slip off of him, leading him down onto the futon.

He lays on you, full body contact, just as needy as you are to feel your skin on his. He nips at your neck. You drag your nails down his back. He slips your shoes and socks off. You undo his pants and slide them down his hips, and the familiar sight of his bulge snakes out to greet you. ‘Aw yeah, xeno dick,’ you think to yourself for the how many hundredth time, and the irony is just enough to bring a tiny smile to your lips. You don’t know if Tavros knows what you’re thinking, but when he kisses the curl at the edge of your mouth, you can almost feel the affection radiating from his face like some kind of heat. All that love for one tiny fucking smile. You suddenly can’t stand that you’re still wearing clothes, and you fumble with the button of your jeans until he helps you yank them off. He turns away just long enough to shuck his pants as well. His bulge curls around your dick as soon as he’s back, and you wrap your legs around him to pull him as close as you can. You’re both so fucking hot, and your skin slides against each other with a forming film of sweat, but you can’t stop trying to get closer. His bulge moves, and you rock your hips into him, swallowing the noises bubbling up in your throat. His thumb slides over your nipple, and you whine into his mouth.

“On your back,” you say, and he immediately flops backwards and snuggles down into the futon for you. He watches you with keen, open eyes as you move to him, anticipation hitching on his breath in a way that almost makes you lose track of what you’re doing. He shifts onto his side and drops one of his legs, leaning the other on the back of the futon so you have a full, uninterrupted view of Tavros fucking Nitram, quivering thighs and curling bulge and a nook that knows exactly what’s about to happen. You straddle his leg, grab your twitching dick, and rub your thumb over the tip, smearing down a pearly drop of pre-cum. You could get off to this, _have_ gotten off to this, watching him watch you pump yourself to orgasm over his begging body, but that’s not nearly enough for you now. You guide yourself to the entrance of his nook, and you bite down a moan as the head of your dick glides past his seedflap. You’re never quite prepared to be inside him, the way trolls work. The walls of his nook tremble and undulate like a goddamn sex toy, made for a bulge that moves just as much as he does, and he’s no less prepared for you, thick and hard and full. You can hear him gulping down noises, whining, moaning, panting, and fuck, your cool kid façade stands no goddamn chance. You lean forward and thrust so agonizingly slow, trying hard not to overwhelm him with the very human movement. He coaxes you towards him, and you press against his lifted leg, preparing yourself for your favorite fucking part. You feel his bulge slide under your leg and around your balls, finding its way to your ass, and you’re fucking _shivering_ , waiting for him. It flicks over your entrance, wet and lithe and fucking _erotic_ , and you still your thrusts, waiting, relaxing yourself.

“Fuck, yes, _fuck_ ,” you breathe as he pushes into you, his bulge stretched thinner from the reach than it would be if you were riding him straight on but making up for it in his knowledge of your body. God, how he _moves_. You roll your hips back onto his bulge and forward into his nook, and you can’t help the string of words falling from you. Your mind is static, your body heat, and Tavros presses against that sweet spot in you that you can never quite reach yourself. His hands are on your torso, his fingers brush over your nipples, his nook is fucking _rippling_ on your fucking dick and his bulge is petting that goddamn fucking spot and you’re so fucking overwhelmed with sensation that you can’t even think to stop your orgasm from hitting you like a full-body trip to nirvana. You choke on the waves of pleasure, blinded, full of Tavros’s body and voice and smell, taunt with sensation. He tightens under you, bringing you to the edge of overstimulated with his own orgasm. You come down feeling blitzed and heavy and tired, and you twitch as he helps you disentangle yourself from him. You know there’s a mess, but fuck it. You play some futon tetris with him until you’re both comfortable enough to lay down next to each other.

You shove your face into the crook of his neck. He snuggles into your hair. You try to melt into this, to cool off and fall asleep, but as the heat fades away, you feel like you’re fading, too. You don’t know how to appreciate this enough. You don’t know how to love it enough, how to feel like you’ve gotten everything you could have out of it so that you can double die happy. You’re not ready to face Lord English. You’re not ready to double die, or to watch Tavros double die, or to stop existing.

You took eternity for granted. Maybe you took everything for granted. Now, at the edge of oblivion, all you want to do is hug Tavros on a sex-soggy futon and pretend that the rest of paradox space doesn’t exist, even as the cracks in reality throw a kaleidoscope of light onto your living room wall.


	2. Time Stands Still

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like this is going to be a thing!

It’s another hot day in New Dallas, and the sweltering heat’s forced you and Dirk out of your apartment and into an endless string of air-conditioned stores, where you loiter just long enough to seem like real customers browsing the selection of whatever-the-fuck. You had a game going for a while, the two of you searching out the most hilariously ironic piece of useless consumerist garbage you could find, but the constant in-and-out between the fiery hell outside and the cool capitalist sanctuaries indoors proved to be a pretty solid drain on your energy. By the afternoon, all you want to do is drink water and slump around bonelessly. You’re fucking wilting in the heat. Even your hair is limp. If Dirk didn’t use so many goddamn hair products, he’d probably look just as bad.

“Fuck it,” you finally say, slicking the sweat on your forehead back into your hair like a Neanderthal, “do you wanna just bum around the record store until it closes?”

“Yeah,” he says. The record store is several blocks away across hot, shadeless sidewalks, but the guy who owns it is a fan and would be more likely to cook you up a three course dinner than to tell you to leave. You grimace and step out into the furnace. The pavement radiates the horrible heat back up at you, and your mind flashes to an imaginary hellscape of gears and lava that feels so vivid it could be a memory. You hate your over-active imagination sometimes. You squash the weird feeling in your gut that you get when your brain jumps into overdrive, and you begin the ungodly trek across town to the record store, hands in your pockets, shades on your face, sweaty-ass brother at your elbow. The buildings seem to strip themselves to skeletons in front of your eyes, to vomit magma into the streets, and the perfect rhythm of moving machinery fills your ears. It would make you want to beatbox if it weren’t such boiling, sultry bullshit.

“Fucking finally,” you murmur when you enter the safe haven of the record store. The place feels like an oasis. You glance around at the hipster shit covering the walls and the rows upon rows of music—CDs, cassette tapes, records, some other mediums they used to use before the digital age. You and Dirk get pretty much all your vinyl from here.

The owner pops his head out from behind a beaded curtain and, exactly as expected, sends you an enormous grin. “Hey, how’s it going?” he says.

“’Sup,” you return, and Dirk gives him a tilt of his head.

“Anything I can help you find today?”

“Nah, just browsing.”

“Okay, go for it. Mi casa es tu casa. Let me know if you want to listen to anything!” He winks and disappears behind the beads. You glance at Dirk.

“Well, while we’re here anyway, got anything in mind?” he says, and your lips twitch up into a near smirk.

Two hours in, you’ve listened to about thirty records and decided to buy about half of them. The shadows are getting longer outside. Other customers have come and gone, but none of them are worth noticing. You have another two hours and thirty-eight minutes until the store closes for the night. You’re carding through a section you’ve never really touched before, and the bell above the front door tinkles to let everyone know that someone new is popping in for a visit. You glance up as a reflex, and you fucking _freeze_.

Two troll saunter in, passing back and forth some kind of silly banter. Trolls aren’t anything new. Trolls are always around, shooting the shit and being a generally unremarkable facet of city living. Hell, half the human population has a few drops of troll blood rolling through their veins from what you’ve heard, thanks mainly to modern science and technology for inventing new ways to make babies. Trolls are no big deal.

But this troll. _This_ troll. Big ox horns, big bright eyes, big fanged smile, average height and body. No one you would be afraid to meet in an alley at night. You could probably kick his ass if you wanted to. He’s brown-blooded by the look of his sign, which brands itself into your eyes like some sort of message from God. He’s not even your fucking _type_ , but you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut. Like someone’s phased their hand through your ribcage and taken your heart hostage, waiting for the right word or look to crush it into a bloody mess. You can’t fucking _breathe_. He’s sweating just as much as you were several hours ago, but with all this pressure completely decimating your cool, he’s an airy fucking breeze in comparison. You don’t know what’s happening to you. You don’t feel right. You feel like you’re gonna fucking _cry_. You stare at him, and it’s like you’re teetering on the edge of a precipice, like you’re one step away from oblivion.

“Dude, are you okay?” Dirk asks. You don’t answer.

The troll hugs the opposite wall with his friend, some juggalo looking asshole with a pressing need to wash his hair. The juggalo picks up a record, flashes it at your guy, says a few words, and your troll laughs. It’s like the kind of thing you’d hear in your dreams. Maybe you _have_ heard it in your dreams. You’re actually sure of it suddenly. You’re _sure_ you’ve heard that laugh before. Fuck, what? _What?_

They turn around. They’re facing you. He looks down, picks through some CDs, exchanges some words with his friend, glances up, and...he’s looking at you. And he freezes, just like you did. His face goes blank, but not quite blank—there’s something lost there, or disoriented, or pained. And you fucking lose it. Some kind of noise is filling your ears, like a freight train or a tornado or a tsunami or some other dangerous thing that’s getting ready to mark the end of your existence, and you’re scared. You shove whatever you’re holding somewhere it probably doesn’t belong and turn to Dirk. “We need to leave,” you say, and you don’t wait for his reply. You turn on your heels and bolt. You barely manage to seem like a reasonably adjusted member of society exiting a respectable establishment. You don’t care that it’s hot out. Something’s wrong with your body or your mind or whatever it is that connects the two, and you can barely feel the heat. All you can think or feel as you march yourself home is ‘What the fuck?’

You forget that Dirk is probably somewhere behind you, and you close the door, leaning against the cheap, flimsy wood and breathing. You don’t have to look up to know that your apartment feels wrong. You take a step inside and lift your eyes. You feel like you’re spectating through another person’s body. Something is missing. Many things. Visions of objects and moments ghost up to the very tip of your subconscious and tease at your waking mind, but nothing comes to you. It pricks at your neck and drags you down. You stand still, drowning.

The prickling instincts in your mind draw your eyes to the bin that holds all of your and Dirk’s DVDs. You walk over and open it, moving box after box of movies out of the way until your hand falls on something that makes your heart flip. Disney’s _Peter Pan_. You only ever watched it once when you were younger. It made you cry. You were mortified. No part of Disney’s _Peter Pan_ should make anyone cry for any reason, and there you were, being a huge dumb baby about literally nothing. But it wasn’t really nothing, you remember. It...made you feel like you feel right now. Like your existence is suddenly and violently exploding open into a big black hole, and you have such a desperate, nostalgic ache for whatever’s on the other side that you can hardly stand it. It feels like grief. Disney’s _Peter Pan_ makes you feel like you’re grieving. How fucked up is that?

You go to the tv and put it in. Your apartment is still hotter than hell, but you pull your sheet off of your bed and wrap it tightly around yourself before you hit play. The movie starts off without any incidents. You get through a good bit of it with only a weird sort of rolling in your gut, no big deal. But you get to the part with the mermaids, and some phantom from your unconscious mind bubbles up a phantom laugh that you’re positive you recognize, and everything in your torso seizes at once. You can’t help it. Your eyes burn. You _hurt,_ and none of it makes sense.

Dirk walks into the apartment to find you watching _Peter Pan_ and crying on the floor in a sheet like a little bitch.


	3. One Step Closer

“So, what are we going to do about this?” Dirk asks as he hands you an ice-cold glass of AJ.

“About what?” He lifts an eyebrow a fraction of an inch and gestures to your entire body, which is still wrapped up like an eggroll in your sheet despite the stifling heat. You try not to grimace. “Look, okay, ‘this’ was nothing. How about we just divert our eyes and pretend ‘this’ never happened.”

“Tempting, but no.”

“Why.”

“Because you have never broken down like this before, and I find that disconcerting.”

“First of all, you’re wrong. I broke down exactly this same way the first time I watched this movie and also that time we went to the zoo in fourth grade. Secondly, I think this all makes a pretty good argument for why we should both help me save some goddamn face and turn a blind eye like Good Samaritans do when people completely lose their shit.”

He sighs lightly through his nose, just enough so you can hear it. “So you’re fine now?” he asks.

No. “Yeah,” you say.

“So we can start the movie over and watch it all the way through? It’s been a while since I’ve seen Peter Pan. Cute movie.”

“No. Fuck off.”

“What part of it do you not like?”

You almost groan. You don’t want to think about it. You just got done settling all your shit down, and that’s where you want it to stay. “I don’t know, okay?” you say. “Something about it just…fucking sucks. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. It’s like it reminds me of something that doesn’t actually exist, and it makes me feel shitty to remember it.”

“Is that what happened with the guy at the record place?”

All your words catch in your throat. You don’t even know how to answer that question, how to even think about it, so you gulp down half the glass of AJ and stay stubbornly silent. You’re beginning to get a headache. When you close your eyes, you can almost see ominous cracks of colors shimmering at the back of your brain. Dwelling on them too hard threatens to pull you back into the black hole of mystery misery, so you don’t.

“Hey,” Dirk says. You almost forgot your eyes were closed. You glance up at him. “Go to the oracle,” he says. “If you won’t talk to me about it, at least get some advice from somewhere.”

“The oracle?” you repeat. “Come on, dude, that shit ain’t real.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You’re kidding, right? It’s totally fake.”

“The Lalondes seem to think it’s real enough,” he replies. “Rose goes once a week, from what I’ve heard.”

“They have oracles in the middle of the woods?”

“They’re all over the place, bro.”

“Well, fuck. And here I was, thinking we had some kind of mom-and-pop oracle. I didn’t know they made chain fortunetellers for the deluded and disenfranchised.”

Dirk’s mouth twitches into a small smile. “McOracle,” he says.

“You want fries with that prophecy of doom?”

“Hold the eldritch screeching.”

“I can see why Rose would be into that,” you say. “She probably spends the whole time fondling herself with a cheap crystal ball and speaking in tongues.”

“Maybe,” Dirk says. “As unnecessary as that mental image was. But she’s not stupid. There’s something in it.”

“Probably inspiration for her wizard porn,” you say. “I bet she writes down all the try-too-hard occult bullshit and uses it to flush out her godawful purple prose.”

“You’ve never actually read anything she’s written, have you?” he asks.

“Have you?”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck, really? It’s nothing but convoluted bullshit.”

“It's not, but that doesn't matter right now.” Dirk sighs and crosses his arms. “Look, just go see the oracle. Or a shrink. I don’t care which. But you were really freaking me out back there, and I don’t want you to sit around pretending like nothing happened.”

You bite down a comment. It’s not every day Dirk admits straight-up that something freaked him out. “…Fine,” you say. One visit to a fake fantasy prophesy machine won’t kill you. It’s not like you’re the only person who’s ever been there. Plenty of people around the area go to the oracle for quick advice, and you’ll admit that you’ve never heard a bad review. It just reeks of a scam in your opinion. You don’t even know why Dirk would—

“Wait,” you say. “Have you been there?”

He shrugs. “A couple times.”

“Really? _Why_?”

“I had some shit to deal with. It got dealt with. I’m doing better now.”

“What shit?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, fuck that. Why do you get to see my shit smeared all over the goddamn table where everyone can see it, but you get to keep your shit stashed away all done and fucking dusted? ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it’? Bullshit. Bring the shit out. I demand to see the shit.”

“Hey, I got a better idea,” Dirk says, completely unfazed. “How about you just go see the goddamn oracle?”

“Will you tell me about your shit if I do?”

He considers the question and shrugs again. “Someday. If I get to hear about your shit once you got it figured out.”

“Deal,” you say, standing. You shuck the sheet off yourself.

“What, you’re going now?”

“Fuck yeah, the sun’s going down. Maybe it’ll actually be a livable temperature outside and I won’t die of heat stroke on the way there.”

“Fair enough. Take a katana.”

He tosses you a cheap sword, and you sling it over your back. “Get ready to throw your shit on the table when I return completely cured,” you say, opening the door.

“Not likely,” he says. The door swings shut, and you make your way down the stairs in bounds to get out of the suffocating hallway as quickly as you can. The pavement outside is still broiling, but the air is beginning to let go of some of its heat. You begin the hike to the oracle, which is housed somewhere downtown. You figure you’ll find it easily enough when you get there.

When you do manage to find it, it’s not as gaudy as you expect it to be. It’s clean and austere, sort of like any basic business you might find around the downtown area, and the only clear sign it’s what you’re looking for is the stylized sun symbol on the front door. You don’t really know the protocol for oracle visits, so you open the door and peek inside. There’s no one in the lobby, which is set up like some kind of waiting room. Opposite of you is another door, and above the handle is a little green sign that says ‘vacant.’ Like the little signs on those portable toilet booths. So this is the oracle’s aesthetic. Booth toilet chic.

Since it says vacant, you stroll across the empty waiting room and through the other door. You flip the lock when it closes to get some privacy for your dirty business. To your disappointment, there’s a total lack of toilets or toilet-like fixtures. On the opposite wall are four blank monitors, set up in a square with a quaint roof-shaped top bringing the whole deal together into the figure of a house. The whole thing looks pretty juvenile, like something you’d see at the children’s museum, but something about it makes your heart stutter. You glance away and get a load of the rest of the room. Not much else is around. Some more blank monitors. A raised platform on the floor with some fancy symbols on it. You were expecting more New-Age mumbo-jumbo instruments of fortune-telling and bohemian decorations. The industrial feel to the room is throwing you off. Nervous little butterflies flutter in your stomach, and you try to swallow down your growing uncertainty.

“Okay, so,” you say, talking to yourself to ease your own tension, “I’m guessing this is where I contact the Powers-That-Be.” You approach the keyboard in front of the house-shaped monitors. “Kinda impersonal, isn’t it? You’d think you’d lean more towards voice chat or vision-inducing drugs. Maybe some ominous cards with pictures of skeletons and saucy women in the nude doing esoteric things. How do I start this thing?” You press a button, and the upper left monitor flickers to life. It displays a picture of the same sun that was on the door.

“Hello,” a voice says suddenly. You’re so startled you jump back and your hand flies your katana before you realize the voice is coming from the monitor. The voice is familiar, but not the jarring kind of familiar that fucked you up in the record store. More like the ‘someone you talked to recently’ kind of familiar. You can’t quite put your hand on it.

“Yo,” you say. The monitor doesn’t speak again. “Hello?”

You repeat yourself a few more times before you realize that you’re supposed to be typing. Which is why the keyboard is there. All this fancy equipment and the Powers-That-Be can’t afford a microphone.

yo

“Ah, there you are. First time?” the voice asks. It’s definitely a feminine voice. Kind of uppity. God, you know you know this voice.

yeah sorry  
figured youd have a voice chat option on this end  
its cool though i got it 

“I’m glad you were able to master our complicated technology,” the voice says with a lilt of sarcasm, and you got it.

wait wtf  
rose is that you  
is that why dirk says you go to the oracle all the time  
youre the mastermind behind this scam  
jfc i knew this oracle crap was a load of bs  
could you be any more transparent about it damn  
i’m honestly kind of disappointed  
i figured you would come up with something a little less obvious of a complete hoax than this if you were gonna go full on con artist  
is dirk in on it  
why didnt yall tell me  
i wouldve thrown down a few better ideas that werent so *call this number and well read your palms over the phone*

“Dave, shut up,” the voice says. You knew it. So this is what it takes to get a secret out of anybody. You gotta have such a colossal and pathetic existential break-down that your brother feels sorry enough for you to spill the beans. You’re a little hurt. You can only begin to wonder what the rest of the gang are hiding from you. “Before we get too far ahead of ourselves,” Rose says, interrupting your thoughts, “I want to be perfectly clear that this is not a scam and I am not the Rose you know. I would also like to preemptively decline to explain myself. Asking the Rose you know is fruitless. Just accept it.”

okay sure  
whatever you say  
ill just casually accept all this inane nonsense at face value  
im not gonna out your scam you know  
how much money does this bad boy make you

“None,” she says dryly.

see thats what i would call a waste of time  
unless you actually like doing this kind of thing  
you like doing it dont you  
you get off on handing out a bunch of baloney supernatural advice  
youre living out some sort of megalomaniacal psychotherapist fantasy arent you

“You have no idea,” she says. “But enough about me. Why are you here, Dave? And, for the record, please tell me a little about yourself, just so we’re clear on…the details.”

what details  
weve been chatting since grade school  
what dont you know

“Why you’re seeking supernatural advice, for starters?”

oh yeah that  
i may or may not have had a complete meltdown in public earlier today and then went home to cry over peter pan  
the animated disney version  
you know what im talking about right  
did you ever get to watch disney movies growing up or

“Yes, I know what you’re talking about. What triggered your meltdown?”

uh  
a guy  
a troll

“Describe him for me.”

big cow horns  
brown blood  
taurus sign  
i mean i literally know nothing about this guy he just gave me some sort of panic attack

“Okay. That’s all the information I need. I’d first like to say that this is a fairly routine case for someone in your position. There’s no need to be alarmed. We’ll be sending someone over to help you. Please stand back.”

someone in my position  
what the hell does that mean

You barely finish typing when the platform in the corner explodes into a bright, white light and a loud bang. For the second time since you’ve entered the room, your hand flies to the handle of your katana. Thanks to your awesome shades, your eyes take no time to adjust. There’s a troll with curved horns standing on the platform, decked out entirely in red and sporting a sweet pair of butterfly wings.

“Holy shit,” you say. “Where’d Rose get a teleporter?”

“That’s a very long story,” the troll says, stepping down from the platform. “A _very_ long story. We’ll get to that later. Do you know who I am, Dave?”

“Uh,” you say. You...do you? Something about her is vaguely familiar, but not like ‘I definitely know this person and can place their name and face in my past history.’ But you do feel an unsettling shadow of déjà vu, not anywhere near as strong as it was with the troll in the record store but there nonetheless. Like waking up from a dream to find you’re still in a dream, but neither of those things are true right now and, honestly, you’re starting to get tired of trying to figure out who people are and why you think you might know them.

“No,” you say. “Sorry, was I supposed to hear something from Rose? Because…you’re, what, a troll fairy? I mean, that’s basically awesome, so I’m honestly pretty surprised we haven’t had at least one sizable chat about it.”

She laughs. “No, I doubt you would! That’s another thing we can get to later. My name is Aradia, and I’m here to help you with your problem!”

“So does everyone get a troll fairy godmother when they come in for some garden variety advice?”

“Nope! Just you. You’re a special case.”

“Is it because me and Rose are tight? Am I getting special treatment because I’m in with the in crowd? She’s trying to keep me quiet, isn’t she?”

“Well…you’re not exactly wrong about any of those things! You might understand with a little bit of time, but we’ll see. Some do, some don’t. Some do and wish they didn’t. It’s up to you.”

“Okay, that sounds like some ominous bullshit, but I guess that’s the oracle bit at play, right?”

“You got it!” she says with a laugh. “That’s how oracles work. If you don’t come into the understanding yourself, you won’t truly get it!”

“Is that really how they work?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Sounds like a lot of time and effort.”

“Yes.”

“So I can’t just go home and tell Dirk that I’m completely cured and he’s gotta fess up.”

“No, sorry.”

“Okay. Fine. So what do I gotta do to get a bona fide certification of perfect mental health from Rose’s bullshit occult clinic?”

“You’ll know when you’ve figured it out,” Aradia says with a smile. “But we can start by looking at your case. Which Dave—that is to say, what are your particular circumstances?”

“My particular circumstances? Like, what kind of circumstances are we talking about? Do you want the full life story, Dave Strider unabridged, or—“

“Just the parts that brought you here. You’ve been having existential meltdowns, right?”

“One, yeah. Is that in the client report?”

She laughs. “Yes. But it’s also how it usually starts. You said that it was a troll that triggered your meltdown this time?”

“What makes you think it’s happened more than once?”

“It always happens more than once,” she says with some kind of knowing twinkle in her eye that makes you suddenly rather uncomfortable.

“Uh,” you say, “okay...so, I was just out minding my own business, and this troll walks into the place with one of his troll friends, and shit went downhill from there.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding and, to your surprise, folding her legs beneath her to float midair. “Explain to me how you felt when you saw him, please.”

“How I—what, do you want me to describe in excruciating detail all the ways I lost it?” you ask. You don’t really want to do that. That’s not really a thing that sounds appealing to you, now or ever.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do,” she says. “It matters! If it makes you feel better, I’m just trying to place you so I can figure out how to help you better.”

“’Place’ me,” you repeat.

“You’ll get it eventually. Probably. So...?”

You let out a huff through your nose and shove your hands deep into your pockets, closing your fist around the cotton lining. Thinking back to the troll in the store makes your gut roll. You’re not really over it yet. It just happened a couple hours ago. The gaping void of _something missing_ is still hovering in the undercurrents of your mind, waiting to suck you in. You clench your jaw and glance up at Aradia, who’s watching you patiently, like she’s done this a hundred times before and knows you’ll eventually pop the lid on your thoughts if she just sits and waits long enough.

“I dunno,” you finally say. “I don’t know what you want me to say about it. I saw him, and I got bulldozed by this horrible sense of existential dread and...grief, I guess. That’s how it felt.”

“Did you recognize him?”

The disembodied hands are back around your heart, getting ready to ring it into a bloody pulp, just like they were in the store when you saw him. You remember that laugh. You can hear it almost perfectly, thinking about it right now. The void roars out of your subconscious and surges up to consume you, and you can barely find your voice enough to speak. “Yeah,” you manage to say. Your throat is so tight. “No. I dunno.”

“You’ve never met him before,” Aradia guesses.

“Yeah. He was just there, and I—fuck, I dunno, it fucking hurt.”

“Did you feel that way when you saw me?”

You press your lips together and examine her face, and something about her makes you think she already knows the answer. You shrug. “Okay, I’ll admit that I maybe recognized you from somewhere or something, but it wasn’t a fraction of the same thing as when I saw this guy.”

“Did you feel this way when you first found your friends online?” Aradia presses, leaning in. “John, Rose, Jade...did you ever get this kind of feeling around them?”

Your immediate answer is 'how the hell do you know about those guys?' but you remind yourself that Rose sent her to you, so you figure she must have some inside intel on the matter. Your second go-to answer is no, but even then, you pause. It wasn’t...the _same_ , but facing the jury, you have to admit that feelings were definitely felt. When you first saw Egbert’s blue text on your screen and his silly bucktooth smiley, you remember getting plowed down with a firm sense of _something_ , like a definite ‘I gotta introduce myself to this person right now or I will regret this moment for the rest of my life.’ Same thing with Jade and Rose. You were without a doubt drawn to them like some sort of moth to a flame, no two ways about it, but you never really questioned it before. You just figured it was some sort of lonely kid way of confusing really strong attraction to certain personalities as a kind of warped, grandiose delusion of destiny. But the feeling was strong, yeah. Really fucking strong. Not enough to send you into the deep end like it did today, but enough to freeze you in your computer chair, fingers hovering over your keyboard, shallow breathing and sweat beading on your forehead, which you guess is a pretty big deal. It sounds kind of creepy now that you’re looking back on it.

“I felt...a way,” you say. “But not a ‘break down and cry’ way. Not like...grief, or whatever.”

Aradia nods. “That makes sense.”

“Does it?”

“Yes. To me, it does. It probably would to Rose as well. Your friends are a bit of a universal constant. And it helps me place you to know how you feel about them.”

“'Place me.' You keep saying that. What does that mean?”

“It means, to me, that you had time to reconcile your fate with them, or you weren’t afraid they would be lost to you. They were not what makes you special or what sets you apart.”

You frown. Something pricks at the back of your neck. Her words are drawing whispers out of the black hole in your mind, and the fact that you don’t understand anything that’s being said is making you feel trapped, suffocated by your own frustrating inability to comprehend. “Sets me apart from what?” you say. You don’t get it. You don’t fucking _get_ it.

“We all have experiences that make us unique from the selves we would become if we didn’t have those experiences,” Aradia says, watching you closely. Keenly, like you’re an experiment.

“Yeah? I guess that’s a thing that someone can say is true,” you say.

“Which is to say, I think I know who you are now, Dave,” she says.

“What do you _mean_?”

“It means I know what makes you unique. And I know what you’re grieving for!”

“So you know how to fix the problem? Lay it on me. What do I need to do? Do I have some penance to serve? Do I need to embark on a hard and dangerous pilgrimage to set an offering on the alter of some god of unintelligible bullshit?”

She laughs. “No, I’m afraid not! Have you tried talking to him?”

“To who? John?”

“No, Tavros!”

“Tavros,” you repeat. You don’t need to be told who she’s talking about. His face pops up in your brain, clearer this time. Almost frighteningly clear. From every angle, in every way. Every expression, from joy to irritation to sorrow. Tavros.

“Yes. Tavros,” Aradia says, her grin widening. Like she can see straight into your mind. Or like shit’s flashing across your face in a very uncool way that you’re going to have to fix post haste.

“How am I supposed to talk to him?” you say, wrestling Tavros Theater back into your subconscious where it came from. “I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know where he lives or what he does or any of his contact information. He’s a face in the goddamn crowd, and the crowd is pretty fucking huge around here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I’ve never been outside this room, actually,” she says with a laugh. “At least not in this city.”

“Oh, shit. Well, in that case, do you wanna go grab some burritos? I can show you around.”

“Are you offering to take me on a date, Dave?”

“What? No. Just offering to get some burritos and show you around. This room fucking sucks.”

“Sorry,” she says, chuckling, “but I’ve got work to do. Besides, all these cities begin to feel the same after a while anyway.”

“I mean, if you say so.”

“I’m going to leave you with an assignment for now, Dave,” Aradia says. She lets her legs down and stops floating, which gives you the firm impression that your consultation or whatever this has been is coming to a close. “Contact Tavros. If it helps, his chumhandle should be ‘adiosToreador.’ And if I’m right about who I think you are and who he should also be, he’ll be just as excited to meet you as you are to meet him!”

“I don’t know if ‘excited’ is the right word,” you say. “Unless you’re talking about the panic-inducing terrified kind of excited.”

“Either way!” she says with a laugh. “Trust me, Dave. This is the first step to putting it all back together. And once everything is back together, you can start to pick up the pieces. It’s hard, but it’ll be worth it in the end.”

“Pick up the pieces? What pieces?”

“Bye!” she says, taking a step back onto the platform. In a flash of bright light, she’s gone, and you’re left standing dazed in an empty room with a name and chumhandle rattling around your brain.


	4. Don't Be Afraid

What the hell are you supposed to do with nothing but a chumhandle? Cold contact the guy out of nowhere? ‘Hey, you don’t know me, and I think I don’t know you, but my life is falling apart and I guess having a good heart-to-heart with a complete stranger is the doctor-prescribed cure.’ And then what?

You palm your phone for a day and half, transferring it from hand to hand, staring at the screen like something is going to happen, but you can’t work up the mangrit to act on Aradia’s deceptively simple advice. When you finally type the name into pesterchum and a match actually pops up, you’re so horrified that you bury your phone back in your pocket and leave it alone for a full hour. Except ‘horrified’ isn’t really the right word. ‘Overwhelmed,’ maybe, or maybe ‘anxious,’ or maybe ‘awestruck,’ but with the connotation of ‘awe’ that Rose would use unironically to describe one of her eldritch horrors. You just can’t believe it’s actually that easy. And you don’t know what ‘it’ is in the first place, or why ‘it’ being easy is so staggering to you. It feels like the turbulent, crippling anticipation that fills a person up right before they intend to confess their love to their dumb crush, except that you don’t know this guy, you’ve never had any experience dealing with a crush before, and you’re supposed to be way too cool for this level of silly teen bullshit. But here you are, with your phone back in your sweaty hand, staring down at a chumhandle that actually exists and is totally available for real conversations. You can send it a message right now. Just by typing out a few words. It’s within your power to do so.

If you’re going to be able to look yourself in the mirror, you’re going to have to grab yourself by the balls and get it over with. It’s one stupid thing. Holy fuck, why are you being such a pansy all of a shitting sudden?

You gulp down your anxiety and nearly swallow your tongue in the process. Your thumbs hover above the keyboard.

TG: yo  
TG: tavros right

Almost immediately, a little bubble pops up with three damning little dots that blink up at you as if to say, ‘Oh boy, are you in for it.’ You stare down at the screen, your heart hammering, your stomach flipping like a goddamn carnival ride. The bubble disappears. You almost feel worse without it. A thinning sensation in your body’s trying to tell you that you’re not breathing enough. The bubble reappears. Disappears. Reappears.

God, what is he even fucking _doing_?

AT: uH,  
AT: hI,  
AT: yEAH, tHIS IS tAVROS,

The words sear through your eyeballs and into your mind. Yeah, you think. Yeah, this is Tavros. You’re not breathing at all anymore. You’re pressed into the corner of the futon, curled up around your phone, and the apartment feels so out of place around you that even the air feels like it’s missing something vitally important. The floor is oblivion below you. Cracks of color dance at the back of your brain. Your subconscious floats the name ‘Tavros’ around your mind like you’ve known it all your life.

TG: do you know who i am

You watch the three dots blink. You remind yourself to breathe. You don’t know what you want his answer to be.

AT: uH,,,  
AT: i,  
AT: dON’T THINK SO,  
AT: bUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN TO SUGGEST THAT i DON’T WANT TO, iN ANY WAY,

You release all the air you’d been holding in your lungs in a giant sigh. What did you expect? ‘Oh, yeah, Dave Strider, of course I know you’? Yeah, wouldn’t that have just taken all of the responsibility off of your shoulders. No need to figure this out for yourself, Dave Strider. ‘Remember, we kissed under the tree in pre-school during recess, and you promised you’d come back for me someday. I’ve been in this salty haunted lighthouse at the edge of the ocean awaiting your return, crying over the pair of pants you left behind that I haven’t stopped ironing for twenty years.’ Maybe it’s not that easy after all. Whatever ‘it’ is.

TG: cool  
TG: me too  
TG: about getting to know you i mean  
TG: how about we get cracking on that

AT: yOU MEAN LIKE,  
AT: rIGHT NOW,

TG: yeah like right the fuck now  
TG: i mean we technically just met and have literally never said a single thing to each other ever  
TG: supposedly  
TG: although a magical fairys got me questioning the reality on that assumption  
TG: actually no you know what  
TG: lets pretend i didnt just say that and back this whole thing up to square one  
TG: my names dave strider nice to meet you

There’s a pause on the other side of the line, and you wait for the little bubble to pop up and reassure you that he’s still there. Hopefully paying complete attention to you. You don’t know why he’s taking so long to reply, but it’s making your brain turn into a mess of static and uncertainty. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe you should bail now. You can go back to the way you were before you ever set eyes on him. It’s not like it was that hard.

But you’re starting to wonder if that’s really as true as you want it to be.

AT: hI, dAVE,  
AT: iM tAVROS nITRAM, wHICH,  
AT: i GUESS YOU ALREADY KNOW SOMEHOW, aND i’M OKAY WITH THAT MOSTLY,

TG: mostly  
TG: fuck i already freaked you out didn't i

AT: oH, nO, i DIDN’T MEAN TO IMPLY THAT YOU KNOWING MY NAME WAS AT ALL UPSETTING TO ME,  
AT: jUST THAT, uH, iT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE,  
AT: iN THE SAME WAY THAT THE REST OF THIS CONVERSATION IS TAKING ME BY SURPRISE,  
AT: cAN i JUST ASK, bEFORE WE COMMENCE GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER, hOW YOU KNOW ME,

TG: oh shit yeah  
TG: i got your chumhandle from a magical fairy oracle  
TG: she said we should chat  
TG: and so here i am  
TG: chatting  
TG: feeling great generally speaking  
TG: how about you  
TG: are you getting anything out of this

AT: uH, i THINK,  
AT: wE SHOULD RETURN TO THAT QUESTION LATER, mAYBE,  
AT: yOU MENTIONED, jUST NOW, a MAGICAL FAIRY,

TG: yeah bro  
TG: a magical troll fairy to be precise  
TG: she had wings and magical pajamas  
TG: the whole works  
TG: her names aradia you can look her up at the oracle if you want  
TG: you like fairies dont you

You don’t know why you typed that, but you realize it’s true the second you send it. Tavros pauses again. You wonder if you’ve overstepped some sort of boundary. You wouldn’t be surprised. You’re kind of creeping yourself out.

AT: yEAH, i DO,  
AT: eVEN THOUGH THEY AREN’T REAL,  
AT: eXCEPT THAT APPARENTLY THEY ARE, bECAUSE YOU TALKED TO ONE, iN ORDER TO GET MY CHUMHANDLE,  
AT: aND SHE HAS THE SAME NAME AS MY BEST FRIEND, wHICH IS A LITTLE,  
AT: wHOA,  
AT: uNLESS THIS IS A JOKE, aND SECRETLY YOU’RE PLAYING A PRANK ON ME,  
AT: eVEN THOUGH, iN TERMS OF YOUR STORY BEING FACTUALLY CORRECT,  
AT: mY FRIEND ISN’T ACTUALLY A FAIRY, lIKE WHAT YOU DESCRIBED,

TG: no dude i swear  
TG: this isnt prank  
TG: even though i agree that its really fucking weird that your best friend has the same name as the fairy i met who i can 100% vouch for in terms of fairy cred  
TG: so if your friend isnt actually a fairy sorry no dice

AT: i,  
AT: hAVE A QUESTION, aCTUALLY, iF THAT’S OKAY,

TG: yeah sure

AT: yOU WERE,  
AT: tHE GUY AT THE RECORD STORE, rIGHT,  
AT: wITH THE SHADES,

You pause. You feel like you should be surprised that he knows. You haven’t said anything about that. There’s no way he can know anything about you just from your red text unless he looked up your name the second you started chatting with him. But you don’t think he did. You think he just knows. And for some reason, that thought makes your body burn and stomach tie up in knots.

TG: yeah  
TG: that was me  
TG: the guy with the shades  
TG: that should be my rap name actually  
TG: unless dirks taken it already  
TG: no you know what he can be the other guy with the shades  
TG: collectively our brand will be known as the guys with the shades  
TG: with or without the at the record store part  
TG: that might get a little wordy in the long run  
TG: the guys at the record store with the shades  
TG: i just dont think thats gonna work out  
TG: what do you think is it too long

AT: uH, dAVE,  
AT: wHY,  
AT: tHAT IS TO SAY,  
AT: wHO ARE YOU, rEALLY

You stare down at your phone. You bite your lip. He’s the same as you. He knows. Except you’re not sure either of you actually do.

TG: hey  
TG: meet me somewhere tomorrow  
TG: wherever is fine with me its cool  
TG: if you have the time that is

AT: yEAH, dEFINITELY, i HAVE THE TIME,  
AT: wHERE, wORKS BEST FOR YOU,  
AT: wHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO,

TG: anywheres fine dude im down for anything  
TG: or maybe  
TG: you like zoos right  
TG: you strike me as a zoo kind of guy  
TG: how do you feel about the zoo

AT: yES, i LOVE ZOOS, }:D 

TG: okay so  
TG: the zoo at noon  
TG: does that work

AT: yES, oKAY, tHAT'S PERFECT,  
AT: i GUESS, i’LL SEE YOU TOMORROW,

TG: yeah  
TG: see you tomorrow

The last time you went to the zoo, you had a panic attack. You have a sneaking suspicion that won’t be a problem this time. Somehow, that thought doesn’t make you feel any more confident about whatever the hell you’re doing with your life right now.


	5. Heart Beats Fast

So here you are. Outside the zoo, waiting for your mysterious troll enigma, who’s apparently tied to you with red string or however that folktale goes. It’s hotter than fuck again, which you should have thought about when you made plans to meet outside, but you’ve been so full of ass-backward thoughts lately that you’re hardly surprised by your own stupidity. At least the weather is in every other way perfect, with a bright blue sky and tiny white puffs of clouds here and there. You stand in the shade and try to ignore visions of heat and clockwork. You’re almost glad you decided to stick with your typical aesthetic outfit-wise, because anything more extravagant would’ve been a heatstroke death-sentence. But at the same time, you feel underdressed. You can’t shake the feeling that this is a date. That you set up your own blind date with a troll. You’re at the goddamn zoo for fuck’s sake, and your heart’s pounding in your chest waiting for the guy to show up. It’s all very alien to you. You’ve never been on a date before. With a guy. Or a troll. A troll guy. You’ve never really interacted with enough trolls to feel any sort of acute sexual or romantic awakening towards their species, and the gay overtones came from the same area left-field. But no matter how much you try to ignore it, your mind keeps popping up the question, ‘Is this a date?’ like an annoying 90’s pop-up ad. Your brain is clearly broken. You should probably just go home. But you don’t. You stand in the shade and sweat and listen to your heart pound.

You’re not really left waiting that long before he shows up. When you see him, you go rigid with the same kind of shock that hit you in the record store, but you expect it this time. He shuffles towards the zoo entrance, hands picking nervously at each other, his body language reading the same emotions that you feel. He’s wearing black on black on more black, like most trolls do, and you can tell he’s feeling the heat. His face is flushed bronze. Or maybe the heat’s not responsible for that. You don’t fucking know. And what really gets you, what really catches your eyes, are his feet. Socks with goddamn sandals. Who wears socks with sandals in heat like this? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of wearing sandals? Aren’t socks only worth as much as they can keep a person’s feet from getting cold? Aren’t his feet getting sweaty and nasty with that extra layer of unnecessary cotton covering them up when it’s hotter than the surface of the sun out?

The thoughts are simple. Ordinary. And very familiar, very intimate, and inexplicably raw, in a way that makes your breath catch. You feel like you’ve had them before, like you’ve said them before, and you can almost feel the exchange like it’s woven into your life somehow, the two of you bickering about those goddamn socks with sandals. You can feel shoes and socks coming off, sandals flying and bouncing off of heads, going barefoot in fields of grass. You can _feel_ it. It’s like the kind of sharp nostalgia that you can imagine someone might have for Ma’s homestyle cooking after a long day shucking wheat or whatever the fuck, long after Ma has died and the city swallowed up the wheat fields. Or like that feeling when the good-natured old guy in the malt shop down the road says to you when you walk in, ‘Milkshakes are ten cents,’ and you say, ‘I only have a nickel,’ and he says, ‘I’ll put it on your tab,’ and you both repeat that simple ritual every other afternoon for your entire childhood until the old guy croaks, and the next time you enter the malt shop, your airways close up and you’re crying because no one is there to say ‘Milkshakes are ten cents,’ so you can say, ‘I only have a nickel.’ That’s how you feel about his socks and sandals. Like they’re one of those specific, ordinary things you take for granted that can somehow summarize the whole of an inaccessible past once they’re gone, exactly because they’re so specific and ordinary. And somehow, even though you don’t remember having whatever those socks with sandals represent to you in the first place, you feel like you’ve always known deep in your core that you would never have it again. Fuck, you’re not even in the goddamn zoo yet and your eyes are getting prickly.

But here he is, wearing socks with sandals, looking around for you because you’re standing away from the entrance in the shade. Watching him look around like an asshole. You shove your hands in your pockets, take a deep breath, and walk over.

“Hey,” you say, approaching him from behind. He jumps and turns around and…stares at you. Right at your shades. Not even a ‘yo Dave sup’ or anything. It really is like the record store all over again. Both of you staring at each other like deer in headlights, except that you already got that part out of the way when he wasn’t looking like some kind of unexplained and unresolved star-crossed voyeur. You wait and let him get it out of his system. He can’t see you examining his face behind your shades anyway, so you might as well get a good look at his expression. You wish you knew what he was thinking. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing you were thinking just a couple minutes ago. If his eyes are any indication, it might not be way unreasonable for you to make that guess.

“You okay?” you finally say. He twitches to attention and turns a pretty shade of copper.

“Uh, yeah, sorry,” he says. “It’s just, um…actually, no, I don’t have an excuse, and that was rude of me, to stare like that.”

“It’s cool,” you say like you didn’t do the same damn thing. “So. Tavros.”

“Yeah, um…Dave,” he says. He straightens up and sticks a hand out. “Nice to meet you.”

You stare down at his hand. “A handshake?” you ask.

“Uh…this is how humans greet each other, right?” he says, faltering. You can hardly believe it. You almost want to laugh.

“Yeah, you got it,” you say, taking his hand. The contact feels electric and, to your chagrin, very welcome. You resist the urge to do anything weird and get a generic, firm grip that could pass as business casual. “Nice to meet you.”

He grins, and you can see the uncertainty melt off of him. “Thanks,” he says, much more relaxed. “I hope this is okay, but, I looked you up last night after you texted me, and I found some of your music and websites and things. I think you’re an enviably cool guy, which is to say, I admire your talents and what I’ve seen of your personality so far.”

“Holy shit,” you say, and déjà vu hits you like a wall. You’re drowning in it. God, it’s the _worst_. You try to shake it off before it shows on your face. “That’s not fair, dude. Now you’ve got an advantage over me on the ‘getting to know you’ front.”

He laughs. “I guess, that’s a thing you could say is true, but, to be fair, you probably had an advantage over me before, in magical fairy assistance to acquire my chumhandle, so maybe the playing field is more level now.”

“We’ll see about that,” you say, growing more aware by the second that neither of you have moved to release the other’s hand. “I’m going to have to start a petition in favor of giving me back some ground in the form of some hard facts and juicy gossip about your life.”

“Don’t you need signatures, to make a petition worth anything?”

“This petition only needs one signature, and it’s mine.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m willing to add my signature to that petition as well.”

“Okay, great. So that’s a go. We’re moving the ball back into my court.”

“What ball?”

“The sports ball. C’mon, man. Sports.”

“Right, sports,” he says, snorting back a laugh.

“I’ll have you know that I take sports very seriously.” You feel like you’re offering him a small test with the statement. You keep your face as straight as possible. He pauses, but his smile only wavers for a second before it comes back full blast.

“I don’t believe you, at all,” he says. Test: passed.

“Yeah, you’re right,” you say. “Sports are off the table. But animals are on the table in terms of personal interest on your end, right? That’s a real thing? I wasn’t just grasping at straws there?”

“Yes, that’s definitely a real thing,” he says, and you notice a small shift in his expression. Obviously it’s weird that you know that. Kind of like it’s weird that he knows you don’t give a shit about sports. But he’s still smiling anyway, and you’re pretty sure now that you’re not the only one shuffling towards the realization that you’re both just gonna know stuff for some unknown fucking reason, which is not bothering you as much right now with your hand touching his. You squeeze his hand before letting yours drop.

“So why are we standing outside the goddamn zoo instead of walking around and gawking at a bunch of hot, smelly beasts?”

“Yeah, okay, you’re right. Let’s get started, then,” he says with a slight edge of breathiness that isn’t lost on you. Your mind asks you again if this is a date. You still don’t know. You don’t know anything apparently. Fuck it. You turn towards the entrance.

“You know your way around here?”

“Yeah,” he says, taking the cue to lead the way. “Actually, uh, I work here sometimes.”

“You do?” you ask, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, but I’m usually just on call, and I do work at other places, too, so I don’t think I can count as an employee.” He stops inside the entrance and looks from right to left, obviously picking which direction to go. He glances at you and, his smile widening slightly, turns to the left.

“Well, shit,” you say, trailing after him. “If I had known, I would’ve suggested a different place. I didn’t mean to drag you here on your day off.”

“Oh, no, I’m not at all upset about this choice of location, since I actually like being here a lot. I think, at the risk of sounding smug, that I have the best job in the entire world, and that I could do it all the time and still be reasonably happy, assuming that sleeping and eating are still both activities I would also be allowed to do.”

“The best job in the world, huh?” you say. “I dunno, bro, my job is pretty sweet, even if it doesn’t always rake in the money.”

“Even so, my job is definitely better.”

“Yeah? So lay it on me. What do you do? I’m supposed to be the one getting the hot deets here anyway.”

“I’ll show you,” he says with an almost mischievous glint in his eyes. He leads you to a building that’s marked ‘Bird Exhibit’ and opens the door for you. You glance at him as you go inside, biting down a smile. He follows you as you pass through the plastic barrier and into a brightly lit open area, humid and packed with tropical trees and plants. The sound of birds fills the space, and you can see bright colors flying around overhead and chilling in the branches. You pause in the middle of the room, and Tavros stops next to you. You catch him glancing at you. You’re actually too busy catching him glancing at you to expect the rush of red that lands in front of you, and you jump in a very uncool way. Tavros laughs, unfazed, and reaches out to stroke the bird’s head. It nips at his fingers affectionately.

“What, you’re the keeper of the birds?” you ask, recovering.

“I’m the animal whisperer, to borrow the name of an absurd human television personality,” he responds. “That’s what people call me, anyway. Aradia thought of the name and helped me to put together my business, in which I work as a sort of independent contractor for people who need help dealing with difficult or dangerous animals.”

“Huh,” you say. “That suits you.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” he responds with a proud smile. “I’m good at it, and many people call me, such as veterinarians and farmers and zoo personnel, so I like to believe that that counts as being successful mostly. Also, I get to set my own hours and rates and have other perks that pertain to being an entrepreneur, which is nice.”

“Looks like we got something in common there,” you say, venturing to touch the bird. It seems cool with it. “I fancy myself an entrepreneur as well.”

“Yeah?” he says with obvious interest. If he keeps giving you this much constant and positive attention, he’s going to spoil you. It feels like a warm blanket after a long, miserable trek over a frozen tundra.

“I think the term they’re using for it nowadays is ‘internetainer,’ and as stupid as it sounds, it about sums it up,” you say.

“Oh, so, you mean like your websites?”

“Blogs, vlogs, comics, and music,” you say with a shrug. “The works. I got a brand of irony that sells big to the right audience, and sometimes Dirk pops in to add a layer of intensity to my already delirious beats and rhymes. It pays the bills.”

“Wow,” Tavros says with a mixture of awe and delight. “That’s amazing, and also wonderful for you, since you seem like the kind of person for that kind of lifestyle.”

“Yeah, it works out. Looks like we both got something good going for us, huh?” To your surprise, the statement comes out with a pang of something like bitterness, and a little ache throbs in your heart that you can’t understand. The more you think about it, the more these feelings, these aches and pains and grief, resemble something you might feel over an ex you should never have let go. ‘We both got something good going for us,’ like there was a different outcome that should have happened but didn’t, like the separateness implicit in the statement shouldn’t be there. And to your surprise, Tavros’s smile falters for a second. Like he’s feeling something that’s not far off from what you’re feeling.

“Do you want to go look at the big cats?” he asks after a pause. “The lions are pretty cool.”

“Yeah, sure,” you say, glad for the distraction. He leads you out of the bird exhibit, and together you begin to make your way across the zoo, stopping and looking at a leisurely pace, depending on whatever catches your eyes. Tavros turns out to be the best zoo-going buddy a guy can ask for. The animals fucking love him, and they get up, move around, make noise, rub against the glass, and even do tricks with the slightest of prompts from him. You’re much more entertained than you expected to be. Usually you’re pretty ‘eh’ at best about watching a lot of fat animals wilt in the heat, but seeing Tavros interact with them adds a whole new layer to the experience that is very much worth it. Even the heat is almost worth it when Tavros sheds his black button up to reveal a loose black tank clingy with sweat beneath it. About that sexual awakening—you suddenly can’t say for sure you’ve never had it before.

The two of you stop for lunch during the lazy part of the day, when the heat overwhelms everything and makes the air feel stagnant. You grab a burger, and he grabs a salad, which ‘reminds’ you, for lack of a better phrase, that he’s a vegetarian. Your whole afternoon has felt more like a reminder than an introduction. You still don’t get it, and sometimes it still feels overwhelming, but the unexpected plus side is that you feel absurdly comfortable in his presence without much reason or effort. You take turns chattering about stupid shit, some of which is standard ice-breaker fare and some of which is just absolute garbage. You somehow get on the subject of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and now you’re drawing him a doodle on your burger wrapper.  

“This is my magnum opus, hands down,” you say, sliding the wrapper to him. He stares at it, a strange sort of faraway fondness on his face that makes your stomach flip. His eyes flick up to yours.

“Can I keep this?” he asks. Your heart skips a beat.

“It’s just a wrapper,” you say, which you should actually believe is true. Nobody likes SBAHJ that much unless it’s for irony’s sake. But you suspect he’s got his own reasons for liking it differently than everyone else. He doesn’t try to explain himself as he slips the drawing quietly into his pocket. You lean on your elbow, the urge to just ask fighting against the insanity of the situation. Does he feel the same way you do? Is this clicking for him? Does he know what the fuck is going on and why and how?

Instead, you say, “Why do trolls wear black in the summer? Aren’t you hot?”

“Uh, yeah, I am,” he says with a small laugh. “But, I kind of like the heat sometimes. It reminds me of…I mean to say, it makes me think of a desert. I like to imagine, sometimes, a lot of sand, and all over there are ruins to explore and puzzles to solve, which I think sounds like a lot of fun when I’m out doing work in the heat, as a way to keep my mind occupied so as not to be mad about how hot it is.”

“A lot of sand?” you say. A dream-like image pops into your brain of a place that could never exist, but it feels so vivid you could mistake it for a memory. “With like, a gold sky and a pleasant as shit little breeze?”

Tavros gets that look on his face he gets when you say weird, unsettling shit, but this time it’s amped up several times over with an added dose of disorientation. Your own stomach responds with a little twist. “Yeah, exactly like that kind of desert,” he says. “Do you…what kind of desert do you imagine, if I ask you to picture it in detail?”

You suck on the straw of your AJ box and think. “I mean, a desert’s a desert, right? I guess, to get more creative about it, I’m picturing…windmills. Maybe a big-ass disc of rock half-covered in sand, with some giant lizard statues hanging out on top. And a house, on a big patch of grass that’s got no business growing in the desert, with blue windows and a lot of ramps. And another windmill on top. How that for an imagination?”

When you glance over at him, he’s staring at you with his fork in his mouth, by all appearances struck dumb. His expression is weirding you the fuck out. You don’t like it. He slowly removes his fork and says, “Uh, Dave…what do you think of, when it’s hot out?”

“Gears,” you say immediately. This answer is easy. You can hardly get the image out of your head when you’re walking around sometimes. “Lava. Big metal structures made out of bare I-beams. Sometimes there are these gold crocodile-looking statues.”

“And a big record, right?” Tavros says. “The lava falls from the buildings, and the gears are always turning, and there’s also a stock market.”

Your insides ice over. “What?”

“Am I…right?” he asks. He looks like how you feel. You both stare at each other. How can he know any of that? You’ve never told anyone about it before. You’ve never written about it on your blogs or vlogged about it or rapped about it, at least not that you can remember. Or maybe you have and forgot? You don’t know why you would. It’s just some dumb recurring image that pops up when you’re getting pissed at the heat. Something that appears sometimes in your dreams.  A frustration nightmare. Right? That’s all it is, right? _Right_?

But then how can he know?

Suddenly, the black hole that sits waiting in your subconscious explodes open again. Something is on the other side, and it wants you to _know_ , and it wants you to _remember_ , and you’re overcome by that desperate nostalgia that you’re beginning to feel too much. Oblivion is at your feet. Hands are on your heart, ready to tear it apart. And despite it all, you look at Tavros sitting across from you, and you picture him eating in your apartment, and outside, it’s night, and you can hear the ocean.

“Hey, I—look, I have to go,” you say, standing up. “I just—fuck, I don’t know. I have to go.”

Tavros stands, too. “Yeah, that’s okay,” he says. “I think, I can agree about that feeling. But, uh…are you, um…uh…are we going to talk again?”

He looks at you, waiting for your answer, and his anxiety is palpable. The hands around your heart squeeze. You get the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to kiss him, to touch him again, to hold him somehow. It’s like some part of you feels like you’ll never see him again, even though that idea is completely moronic. You have his chumhandle, and he has yours. You live in the same city, or at least close enough that you can get together for a day outing. You could probably video chat with him in the next hour if you really wanted to. There are no barriers or obstacles to prevent you from interacting. And to be fucking frank, you don’t even _know_ him. You just fucking met. But the feeling sticks, and it feels horribly familiar, like it’s happened before. And what freaks you out most is that you really think it might have.

“Yeah,” you say. “We’ll talk. Definitely. No problem. A lot, if that’s what you want. It’s cool.”

“Okay,” he say, and he says it again. “I guess, bye then.”

“See you,” you say, and you turn on your heels and walk away. The roaring is in your ears, and around you is a land of heat and clockwork. You don’t head towards home. You take a bus into the city center and pick a straight path towards the oracle.

There are people in the waiting room this time. That’s what you get for coming on a weekend afternoon. You take a seat and pop in some earbuds to try to get lost in some music, but you’re having a hell of a time. When it’s finally your turn, you slip in, throw the lock, and head straight for the keyboard.

rose  
rose  
hey rose  
rose i need some serious advice stat  
im freaking out rose come ON

“Yes, Dave?” Rose finally says, dry as a tumbleweed.

rose whats happening to me  
you know right  
theres something you know that i dont  
does dirk know  
rose holy fuck

“Give me a minute. I have to figure out where you are.”

why does that even matter  
here ill just start filling you in  
so i was at the zoo with this guy i just started talking to yesterday  
thats its own thing well get to that in a minute  
and we started talking about how hot it is around here  
i dont know how hot it gets up where are you but it was a scorcher today as per usual  
trust me dont visit in the summer

“Dave, I’m sending Aradia. Please stand back.”

You actually do stand back this time, and when the platform explodes into a bright light, you hardly react. Aradia steps down from the platform and sends you a bright smile.

“So it happened again?” she asks with pointed sweetness.

“Yeah. I guess you were right about that,” you say. “I took your advice and sent him a message, and we just met up to shoot the shit today.”

“And now you’re here!”

“Yeah, now I’m here. Something’s going on you didn’t tell me about.”

“Yes, you’re right,” she says with a laugh. “But I did warn you about that. You won’t get it unless you understand it for yourself!”

Your stomach drops. “So, wait, does that mean you’re not going to explain what’s up to me now, or…”

“That depends,” she says, and she tucks her legs underneath her. “How was Tavros?”

“He was…” you start, but it’s kind of a loaded question. You could answer a lot of ways without lying, and you’re not sure which way you would rather answer. “…good,” you finish.

“Did you say hi for me?” she asks with a tiny note of sarcasm.

“I—wait, what? Does he—you’re not his friend Aradia, are you? I mean, he said he knew an Aradia, but he also said she wasn’t a fairy, and you’re pretty obviously a fairy. Right? _Do_ you know him?”

“I know _a_ Tavros,” she says, and a sly little glint sneaks into her eyes. “I actually know many Tavroses! But not all of them know me, and _my_ Tavros is not the same as _your_ Tavros, just like _your_ Tavros’s Aradia isn’t me.”

Your mouth opens in a decidedly uncool way, but you can hardly be damned to care. “What the fresh fuck does any of that _mean_?” you say. You’re pretty sure a good half of your frustration is coming from some deep understanding that you _should be_ getting all this, but you don’t. Multiple Tavroses? Multiple Aradias? And she knows some of them or all of them but they don’t know her and there’s ‘ _my_ Tavros’ and ‘ _your_ Tavros’ and whatever the fuck else? What the dick-splitting hell does any of that actually mean, in a reality that actually makes sense and isn’t the product of a sci-fi creative writing workshop circle jerk?

“Let’s stay on track, Dave,” Aradia says like she wasn’t the one who totally derailed the conversation and your confidence in your own sanity. “I asked you about Tavros. How did you connect with him?”

“Connect with him?” you repeat.

“Yes.”

“Uh…” you say. “I mean, I guess I connected with him…well?”

“How well?”

“Do you want it on a scale of one to ten, or should I tear you a page from my diary?”

“One to ten is fine.”

She sits patiently, a friendly smile firmly on her face. You sigh, and for some reason, you can feel your face growing red. “…Around the nine mark,” you mumble. “I’ll give it a strong…9.4. Maybe 9.6. Somewhere around there.”

“Good! I’m glad,” she says with a grin. “You don’t need to look so embarrassed! This is great news for us. It means my suspicions were correct. And, even more importantly, it means I can give you _this_ with confidence that it’s going to the right Dave!”

“’The right Dave,’” you repeat almost numbly as you take what she offers to you. It’s a CD. A mixtape. Covered in your own handwriting. And it’s not yours.

“Go home and listen to that. Maybe it’ll jar your memory! It’ll at least get your head in the right place, if I’m guessing right,” Aradia says. “Trust me. I think you’ll like it!”

You don’t think you’ll like it, but you don’t think the music will be the problem. You thank Aradia anyway, and she goes back to wherever she came from. You go home. You decide that maybe you should sleep long enough to clear your head before you jump onto whatever emotional roller-coaster she’s sent home with you.


	6. All of My Doubt Suddenly Goes Away Somehow

It takes you half the day to work up the nerve to stick the CD in your computer. After that step’s complete, you vacate the house with some bullshit excuse about getting food, even though you’ve never been so unenthusiastic about eating in your entire life. You have no idea what’s on the mixtape, but your internal organs are already flipping over each other like your innards are a goddamn circus at the high point of the season. It’s cirque du soleil in your fucking gut, complete with clowns and a water show. You haven’t even listened to the damn thing yet. You’re freaking out on nothing but pure anticipation. How did things get this bad?

The air is losing that listless, yellow feeling at the tail end of the afternoon and growing red with dusk before you can bring yourself to sit your ass down in your chair and pull up the mixtape on your computer. Your cursor hovers over the play icon. You hold your breath and click.

The first track doesn’t jump straight into the music. Two disturbingly familiar voices exchange some banter before a simple beat starts up. One of them, without a doubt, is yours. Which isn’t possible, unless you were drunk or drugged when you planned and recorded an entire fucking mixtape. The other voice is Tavros’s. When the two of you talk, you sound comfortable. Affectionate. Intimate enough for quiet laughter and inside jokes you understand but can’t remember. Like you’ve known each other for a long ass time, which is also objectively not true, since you only just met him yesterday. But there’s no skirting around the facts hitting your ears. That’s you and him, and you can recognize your own sound-mixing artistry as the beat picks up. That’s your technique. Your style. No one does it like you do.

And you start rapping. Mixtape you, not you-you. It’s immediately obvious that the lyrics aren’t entirely yours. The flow’s not your typical fare, something a little off from your usual approach, maybe a little side-step away from your personal preference in terms of rhyme and rhythm, and the words aren’t exactly what you would organically produce if left to your own devices. But they aren’t bad. The track is decent, or at least passable according to your strict standards. It’s the same sort of not-quite-you that happens when you collaborate with Dirk. And when Tavros jumps in and picks up what mixtape-you throws down, the collaboration element crystallizes. His sound isn’t quite totally him either. He’s refined with some feedback, that much is clear. And you’re so simultaneously numb and overwhelmed that you don’t even question how you know that.

Your lips move. They follow along without a single misstep, and your mind lags behind, processing, reaching deep into the void of your subconscious to pull out every word, every beat, every rhyme. You know this rap. Like you worked hard on it for a long time to get it how you want it. You were definitely the one to create this tape. This is you rapping. You. The same Dave Strider sitting in this chair, the one who’s never seen this CD before it was handed to you, who never met Tavros before yesterday. You feel it. You know it. It doesn’t make sense. It _shouldn’t be possible_. How the fuck? When? Where? _How_?

You drop your head onto your desk. Four more tracks play. You’re pretty sure you’re dying, if you’re not already dead. Your head throbs. Your heart aches. Your throat stings in a perfect line across your neck. The world around you feels fake, stale, wrong, and the horrifying memory of oblivion presses on you from all sides. You can’t deny the truth that this mixtape meant something important to you for reasons you can’t understand, and that you lost it all, mixtape and whatever else came with it. You want it back. You don’t know what it is, but you want it back. And at the same time, there’s something terrifying in those lost and broken memories that your mind is sure it wants to forget.

“This is pretty good,” Dirk says from behind you, and you jump so violently you have to check your heart to make sure it’s still beating. A shadow crawls up and down your back from his sudden presence behind you. You’ve felt it before and learned to dismiss it as nothing but your overactive imagination, but you have more trouble than usual wrestling the feeling back into the repressed corner of your mind. That does nothing to help your state of mind.

“Yeah,” you say, dropping your head back onto your desk.

“Who’s the other guy?”

Well, shit, what are you even supposed to say? You consider not responding or making something up, but you hardly have the energy to lie. Or to deal with these questions. Or to keep staving off the reality of these clearly fucking important ‘episodes’ you’ve been having. You sigh. “Tavros,” you mumble.

“Who’s Tavros? Have I met him?”

“No.”

“When did you work on this? Have you been sneaking out at night or something?”

“I don’t know.”

He pauses. That’s it. Your crazy is showing. It was only a matter of time before he caught on anyway. He already knew something was up after the record store fiasco, and now—

Wait. He said he went to the oracle before, didn’t he? He and Rose both. Well, obviously Rose has been there. She is the oracle. But—

Wait. Fuck. The oracle-Rose said she wasn’t the Rose you know. And Aradia isn’t the Aradia that Tavros knows. Multiple Aradias, multiple Tavroses, multiple _Roses_. Holy shit. Holy _shit_ , you get it now. Kind of. At least that part.

Has Dirk heard all this before? Does Dirk know there are multiple Roses? He’s been to the oracle. He said he had shit to deal with, and it got dealt with. Shit like…this shit? Maybe Dirk knows. Maybe he gets it.

You sit up. “I met Tavros yesterday,” you say. “For the first time. He was the guy at the record store.”

Dirk considers your statement, and you’re more relieved than you can ever express that he doesn’t show any signs of surprise. He doesn’t immediately throw you into a straitjacket and cart you off for a lobotomy. But there’s something in his body language that isn’t neutral, so he’s reacting somehow, in a very Dirk-ish way that makes you grind your teeth with frustration. Like, ‘Stress? Uncertainty? I’d better turn into a goddamn robot and stop emoting entirely. This is a good defense mechanism that definitely contributes to a healthy sense of social harmony.’ God.

“He’s the guy that gave you the panic attack,” he finally says.

“Yeah,” you say.

“You met him yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“And…he gave you this mixtape?”

“No. The oracle did. A troll fairy called Aradia.”

Dirk nods. “Yeah, sounds about right.”

“You got her, too?”

“Everyone does. People like us, I mean.”

“Like us?”

“Have you figured it out yet?”

You almost flip your desk. “No, I haven’t ‘figured it out’! Is this supposed to be some kind of fucked up puzzle that I have to solve in order to unlock the secrets of the universe or some shit like that?”

“Yes,” Dirk says flatly.

“Oh, hey, I have a better idea! Just fucking tell me what’s going on.”

“You won’t believe me if I did,” Dirk says. “And I’d rather you remember first before we got into it.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because when I apologize, I want you to know what I’m apologizing for.”

Your mind stutters. “Apologize?” you say. “Apologize for what?”

“See, that’s exactly the reaction I don’t want,” Dirk says. “Why don’t you invite your friend over to listen to the tape and see if anything clicks. I’ll go out tonight and give you some privacy. We’ll talk once you know what we’re talking about.”

He turns and leaves. The mixtape is still playing in the background, and you decide suddenly that you can’t handle listening to any more of it right now. You hit pause and stare at the screen, your head full of sludge and gravity. You pull out your phone.

TG: yo

AT: hIII,  
AT: hOW ARE YOU,

TG: thats a loaded question  
TG: are you busy

AT: uH, nOW,  
AT: nOT, rEALLY,

TG: okay good  
TG: come to my apartment  
TG: here ill send you the address

AT: wOAH, wHAT,  
AT: nOW,  
AT: tO YOUR APARTMENT,

TG: yeah  
TG: i got something i need you to listen to  
TG: i need your opinions on it like asap

AT: uH,  
AT: oKAY, yEAH, oKAY,  
AT: i GUESS, I’LL SEE YOU IN A BIT

TG: yeah  
TG: see you

You send him your address and drop your head on your desk. Minutes tick by in absolute silence. You close your eyes and sink into everything that’s happened the last several days, and for the first time you can ever remember, you don’t struggle against the thoughts that rise out from your ‘overactive imagination.’ None of it can possibly be real. You don’t know what real is anymore. You realize, slowly, as you begin to turn everything over and poke at the surface of the void, that you don’t actually know who you are.

At least two hours pass before Tavros finally knocks on your door. You leap up and bound over, and seeing him on your threshold kicks the wind out of you. He gives you a nervous smile and small wave, but his eyes wander past you to your apartment and his smile fades. You move aside and let him in, ducking instinctively beneath his horns as he turns his head to look around. God, it feels familiar. His eyes rove over your stuff, sparing a full moment for the futon, the turntables, the hallway. Neither of you so much as exchange a greeting. You just stand back and watch him move in your apartment. Your old living room suddenly feels like a liminal space, not quite here and not quite there, wherever ‘there’ is, and your skin prickles with the uneasy wrongness of it. Lost memories and missing objects press against your conscious mind, and sometimes a ghostly vision passes before your eyes when he moves past a specific object and you’re so close to remembering you forget to breathe. He finally turns to you, breathless, his eyes bright and awed.

“This is your apartment,” he says.

“Sure is,” you say. “Ringing any bells?”

“Uh,” he says. “I don’t—wow.”

“Hey, hang onto that thought. Follow me.” You tilt your head towards the hallway, and he takes the cue to follow you to your room. He stops at the threshold, and his eyes grow wider. He steps in slowly, looking around, and you’re sure you’ve seen him here before. In your room. His presence here fits.

“You might wanna sit down,” you say, gesturing to your bed. He does, and you just barely notice him running his hand over the sheets as you turn towards your computer. You hit the first track, press play, and turn back around to watch his reaction.

He freezes. You’re starting to get used to that expression. The track moves on, the beat picks up, the rapping starts, and he stares down at your knees, not really looking anywhere in particular. His lips move. His eyebrows twitch up and down as he thinks. His eyes…make your heart clench. He’s putting something together. Probably. Hopefully.

“Sound familiar?” you finally ask. He jumps slightly and looks up at you.

“Uh,” he says, and with a small smile, he jokes, “I can’t rap that well, actually.”

“Rapping well is overrated. I like the way you rap,” you say, even though you’ve never heard him rap. But you have. And he knows it. His eyes look straight into yours, past your shades, and they grow glossy. He squeezes them shut, and tears roll down his cheek. Your own eyes begin to burn in response. “You too, huh?” you say. He nods.

“I thought, maybe, I was just imagining things, to make myself feel better,” he says, wiping his eyes.

“Yeah, I’m in that boat, too,” you say. “Do you know what’s going on?”

He shakes his head. “I was hoping, with all of this, that you would say you did, and that everything would be solved magically.”

“Sorry, no magic here,” you say. He laughs that wet kind of laugh people only make when they’re crying. You examine him, sitting on your bed, wiping away his tears, and you feel like you love him. “I don’t even know you,” you say. “We don’t even _know_ each other.”

He doesn’t respond immediately. Just stares down at your knees, thinking in some sort of melancholy way that you feel in your own heart, reflecting that nostalgia you can’t place right back at you. He takes in a breath and holds it. “I know that…your favorite drink is apple juice,” he says, glancing up at you. “And that you hate puppets, and that you talk to yourself, even when no one is around to hear you, and that you like to take silly pictures and sometimes develop them in difficult and interesting ways to make them look cool. You cut your own hair, but you chew on your fingernails because you don’t like to cut them, and you keep snacks in your closet just in case you get hungry and there’s no food in the fridge. You like weird music that no one else knows about and collect dead things in jars, but you don’t like to kill the things to put in the jars, so you don’t do that part of it. You don’t know how to cook, but you can do laundry okay, even well enough to not stain everything red. You like to stand in the grass with bare feet, because you never got to do that when you were young. You get jumpy, sometimes, too. From bad memories that you don’t like to talk about.”

You can’t breathe. You can’t fucking breathe. Everything inside you is getting crushed by the pressure of what you can’t remember. You don’t even _do_ half of those things anymore. You don’t cut your own hair. There’s food in the fridge. Dirk does all the laundry. You got to stand in the grass when you were a kid, even though you still like doing it. And you’re only jumpy sometimes, late at night, after sharp nightmares you try to forget as soon as you wake up. But you can’t even argue with him. You can’t even say he’s wrong, because he’s _not_ somehow.

“What else do you know?” you ask.

He looks at you for a long moment and breaks eye contact to examine the room. You watch him stand up and lean across the bed. “Uh, this was…a fairy poster. It was mine,” he says, touching one of the posters above the bed. As soon as he says it, you can see it. “And…there were some fiduspawn host plushies here,” he says, pointing to the table next to the window. “You almost made me move them, remember?”

“Because the monster alien impregnation freaked me out the first time we played,” you say. Yeah, you remember that. You’ve never played fiduspawn. You know all the rules.

“And…outside, it used to be different,” he says, leaning out the window. “There was grass. Except…sometimes it changed, and then there wasn’t. There was…sand. Or other things.”

“Gears and bullshit,” you say.

“Yeah, sometimes that, too.”

You don’t know if anything is ‘coming back to you,’ really, but you can see things. You can feel things, like a breeze flowing over your skin and catching in your hair, like metal, like sea salt and sand. You can smell things, hear things. Tavros gets stuck for a second trying to come back in through the window, and you remember that, too. He turns towards you, and you say, “You hum in the shower.” He blushes.

“Uh. Maybe. Yeah.”

“You like to cuddle with the weird creatures that pop out of the host bears. On my bed. We had to make a rule about it.”

He laughs a little. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“You wear socks with sandals when it’s fucking hot out, until I have to forcibly remove them.”

“And then we’re barefoot, like you like to be.”

He grins at you, and you feel your lips twitch up into a smile. “Don’t try to turn the blame on me for your shit fashion choices.”

“They’re comfortable.”

“And awful.”

“Well, uh, you always wear those shades, even at night and when your eyes…”

You both pause. He furrows his brow, and you share the sentiment, even though your expression stays deadpan as usual. You keep your eyes on him as he approaches you from the other side of the room. He stops in front of you and bends down to your level. “Can I…uh, do you mind maybe taking off your shades?”

You stare at him, your heart thudding. The usual answer would be a strict ‘no.’ That’s just how you roll. But you’re not rolling as much lately as sort of lurching around gracelessly like a pile of human garbage, and, looking at him, straight into his chocolate peepers, you know exactly what he’s thinking. That’s not how his eyes looked. His eyes looked different somehow. You can’t place it. You’re not surprised that they’re such a rich shade of brown, since troll irises are always the same color as their blood, and trolls always have that gold where human eyes are white, but you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve never noticed them being that way. That this is a new development. And you can guess what that means on his end. 

It’s not really typical protocol, but you can deal with it. You inhale deeply and take off your shades. The world becomes bright, and Tavros’s pretty irises grow shades richer in color. You resist the urge to bite your lip as he stares straight at you, the tiny flicker of his eyes letting you know that he’s glancing between yours, examining each. “They’re red,” he says with a note of awe.

“Sure are,” you say.

“They weren’t, though. Before, when you took off your shades, they were just…”

“Do you remember?”

He stares at them for a moment longer, like it’s on the tip of his brain but he can’t quite get it right. “White,” he finally says. “They were white.”

“White?” you repeat. And the image floods back to you. Yeah, his eyes were always white. No irises, no troll gold, no nothing. Just…blank, lifeless eyes.

The thought causes an eruption of disquiet to explode in your chest. Blank, lifeless eyes burn into your mind. In a bad way. A way that makes you feel nauseous. Your neck begins to sting again, from one side to the other, like a clean cut straight across your throat. You shove your shades back on and move your chair back to stand up.

“Okay, well, on that note, who wants to play some Tony Hawk?” you say.

“Uh,” Tavros says, recovering quickly from the sudden change in topic. “Okay, but I can’t stay too long, or I’ll miss the last train out.”

“Out? To your house? Where do you live?”

“In the country, a while out of the city.”

Damn, he could’ve told you that before you made him travel all the way here two days in a row. You barely miss a beat before you say, “Stay the night.”

“What? Tonight?” he asks, visibly taken aback.

“That’s where your fairy poster used to be, right?” you say, pointing at your wall. “And your host plushies used to be there? I’d say, given the evidence, a sleepover is long overdue.”

A slow, magnificent grin spreads across his face, and you’re suddenly sure you love him.


	7. I Will Be Brave

You wake up in the middle of the night, sticky with sweat and prickling with adrenaline. The line across your throat fucking hurts, way more than the usual sting that happens sometimes when you think about death. The pain recedes almost immediately after you realize you’re awake, but the memory of it lingers. You feel like you’re dying or that maybe you’re already dead. You sit up and try to ground yourself in the real, willing away the twin ghosts of pain and oblivion clawing their way out of your nightmares. Outside, distant flashes of heat lightning catch your eye and make you envision multicolor cracks breaking across the sky.

“Dave?” someone whispers in the dark, and for an unbearable second, your terror peaks. Tavros lifts himself up onto his arms and examines your face, his pupils wide and reflective like those of a nocturnal animal. You stare at him, and somehow, even as your body floods with relief and something like joy, the overwhelming sense of death intensifies.

“Are we dead?” you ask.

“Uh…dead?” he says. “No…? I don’t think so.” But you can’t shake the feeling. You’re happy he’s here, waking up next to you and almost working up the courage to reach up and run his fingers through your hair to comfort you, which would be totally fine and way welcome. But if he’s here, you must be dead. You’re sure of that suddenly. You’re sure that Tavros’s existence in your room definitely means that you died and are now current dead, and the same rules apply to him. Isn’t that the way things are? But if he’s dead, how are his eyes so bright?

“Did you have a nightmare?” he asks, so quietly you think he probably already knows the answer.

“Shit…I guess?” you say. You inhale deeply and push the heel of your palms against your eyes. Yeah, you had a nightmare. You’re not dead. You just need to shove that idea back down where you force the rest of your weird-ass, disconcerting nightmares. You turn to Tavros and, knowing he’s not yet confident with touching you whenever the urge strikes, you brush back his hair. He visibly relaxes. “Why are you awake?” you ask.

“I did, too,” he says. “Have a nightmare, I mean. A little while ago. I’ve just been watching the lightning and thinking about stuff. Do you…want to talk about it?”

Not really, you think immediately, but you put a pause on that thought. You can’t deny anymore that you gotta figure this shit out. These nightmares and visions aren’t casual symbols and archetypes put out by your brain to do whatever dreams are supposed to do. That much is clear, and if Tavros can repeat back to you the things you see and feel like he’s on the same fun memory-identity scavenger hunt you are, maybe he’s your guy for nightmare sharing. Maybe he’ll know, just like he did before. That idea is seductively comforting.

“Yeah,” you say. “But you woke up first, so you get to go first.”

Tavros grimaces and looks away to pull up the memories of the nightmare. “I don’t remember all of it…” he says, “but, uh…I remember falling. And, in my stomach, there was a huge hole, that made me feel like how you said, about being dead, when I woke up.” He pauses. “There were…bad things happening. There was an evil entity, that was growing too powerful, and I remember that there was something I had to do to stop it, even though it made me very scared, and…I think I failed, to do the thing I needed to do, and to stop the bad things from happening.”

You watch him, thinking. He’s being too vague to really trigger anything existential, but you can still feel a dark mass of impressions churning beneath your conscious mind. An evil entity that was growing too powerful…that at least jumpstarts some kind of vague recollection in you. What the hell, why do the two of you sound like war-battered protagonists in a fantasy novel? Or…maybe ‘protagonist’ is too much of a stretch.

“What about yours?” he asks, turning to you. You sigh.

“I’m always asleep,” you say. “And when I wake up, there’s this fucking…monster dog in motley or some shit like that, all glowing green and being hells of terrifying nightmare fuel. And next thing I know, my throat is slashed open, and I’m bleeding out all over my ugly rag of a suit.”

You wait for him to comment. To drop some kind of revelation that makes everything become crystal clear. Something like, ‘Oh, yeah, I was there, watching with a mixed sense of horror and dismay,’ or maybe, given his account, ‘Hey, yeah, I was falling to my death in the background, having apparently just been brutally stabbed, maybe by the exact same monster you just described.’ But he doesn’t say anything like any of that. He just broods in silence, by all appearances just as clueless as you are about the way these puzzle pieces are meant to fit together. If they’re meant to fit at all. But they are, aren’t they?

“Do you ever dream about a monster like that?” you venture. He furrows his already somewhat furrowed brow.

“I think…in a dream of a dream, I’ve seen something like what you’ve described, but not usually,” he says. “But, even so, I can see it, and I know exactly what kind of monster it is. It’s…a powerful evil, right?”

“Yeah,” you say. “I guess that’s one way to describe it.”

“But not…the most powerful evil. Not the Big Bad.”

No. Not the Big Bad. That comment does poke open the black hole a bit. The heat lightning outside your window brings back to mind the cracks exploding open across a vast expanse of nothing. You hate those cracks, but you know they mean something, and that something is related to this topic. There was definitely a looming threat that could be definitively classified as the “Big Bad,” and whatever it was is something your mind does not want to remember. It sits too close to the oblivion that fucks you up so bad. But you’re starting to realize that if you don’t press back against that oblivion and demand that your unconscious mind give up the goods, you’re pretty sure you’re going to be dreaming of dying for the rest of your life with no idea why and no way to make it stop.

“Was the Big Bad the one who killed you?” you ask. He pauses, and a pained look crosses his face.

“No, it wasn’t,” he says. “It was…sometimes I remember a face, near the end of my dream, and I recognize it, but it makes me sad to think about, so…”

“You try to forget it?”

“Yeah.”

Your heart clenches. A face flickers to your own mind, someone who sometimes features in dreams you don’t want to remember, but you shove it away before you can think about it too much. “Do you remember the Big Bad?” you ask instead. Tavros shakes his head.

“I remember…being here, in this apartment. With you. And then, something bad happens, and…all there is is a feeling like I don’t exist, and that I was going to be that way forever. And then I stop remembering those sorts of things and start to remember real things that happened to me in my wigglerhood.”

‘A feeling like I don’t exist.’ That’s the oblivion you feel. The horrible, awful feeling of nothingness, made worse by the fact that you had something once, and now it’s all gone. You draw in a slow breath.

“Yeah…I know that feeling,” you say.

“You do?” he asks, and he sounds hopeful. You know exactly why. God, it’s good to know you’re not alone.

“Yeah,” you say, and after a short pause, “I’m glad you’re here. Again, whatever that means. It helps.”

You’re a little embarrassed about saying shit like that out loud, but you feel him shift next to you, and he very gently interlaces a few of his fingers with a few of yours. “Do you have other nightmares, besides the death ones?” he asks. “Or dreams, about…the other things?”

Yeah. You’re always having dreams, even when you’re walking around in broad daylight, apparently. “I have dreams about…multiplying, I guess,” you say, trying to hone in on one of the many impressions floating around at the edge of your subconscious. “There’s always a hundred of me running around, and I have to keep track of every damn one of them, or shit goes sour really fucking fast. One of them’s even part bird or something like that. But the kicker of it is that I’m not even really _the_ Dave. I’m just one of the many other Daves. _The_ Dave gets a dope cape and a fly hood and…” Your mind suddenly flickers to Aradia, to her magical pajamas. The symbol on her shirt flashes in front of your mind.

“Dave?” Tavros asks when you don’t continue.

“Nothing,” you say, shaking your head. “What about you?”

He sighs. “I… have dreams about flying,” he says. “Those are the good ones. I’m on a small yellow planet, and there are all these nice buildings and spires to explore, and the people are all friendly and like me a lot. And I can fly around, being happy and safe, mostly, until…that dog monster comes, like you said. But those dreams are dreams inside the dreams, because when I wake up, I’m getting sawn in half.”

“Wow, shit,” you say.

“But then I have legs again, made out of metal, which is pretty cool.”

“Again?”

“Yeah,” he says, and his face scrunches up. “I don’t have legs before, in those dreams. Or I do, but…” He trails off. After a pause, he says, “I have dreams…about falling, that aren’t the ones I die in, but are scary anyway. And dreams about blood. A lot of blood. It’s everywhere, and I’m…supposed to kill someone, but I’m just afraid and overwhelmed, so I run away. But sometimes, I dream of the desert, and I’m exploring with all sorts of strange creatures, who I can convince to be my friends by way of communion, which is okay and kind of pleasant actually, as far as dreams go.”

Your heart thuds in your chest. You stare at your wall and try to ignore all the bad dreams you’ve tried to forget bubbling against the film between your subconscious and your waking mind, making the end of your consciousness into a sludgy tar pit. “I’ve had dreams about a little planet with all sorts of fancy buildings and little people wandering around, too,” you say, to distract yourself as much as him. “It was purple, though. Sometimes Rose is there. And there’s a puppet…” You stop and swallow. The tar pit of bad dreams curdles and moans, like it’s so ready to make you feel like shit. You shove the puppet back down and continue, “and when you go outside, there are these…giant calamari monsters that sort of…talk. It’s pretty disturbing. I’m not way about that dream.”

“On the yellow planet, when you look up at the sky, there’s a big blue planet,” Tavros says, deep in thought. He narrows his eyes like he’s trying to see. “There are clouds, and you can see things in them. It’s an important place for some reason.”

“Yeah,” you say. You can see it. You know what he’s talking about.

“The giant squid monsters…” he says, still thinking. “There were bubbles that floated between them and were full of people.”

“Yeah,” you say. You see that, too.

“Sometimes, when I see bubbles, as in now, when I’m awake, I think of those kinds of bubbles, with people inside of them, floating in a big black nothing. I imagine that the bubbles hold little worlds that change sometimes.”

A flash of lightning outside of your window throws cracks across the image in your mind. Your breath catches. Your heart throbs. “And the sky is breaking, and the end is nigh,” you say. Tavros takes a moment to respond, but he nods.

“There are…all sorts of things, that make me think about stuff that aren’t real, but that feel real,” Tavros says quietly. “Like, uh…sometimes, when I’m with some of my friends, they’ll say or do a thing that makes me feel horrible, but not as in a way like they’re bullying me or trying to be awful, but just because of bad memories of unreal things. Like, with my one friend…” He pauses. You frown.

“You had some shitty friends, right?” you ask. You feel like that’s true.

“Uh…yeah, maybe you could say that,” he says. “I think they’re all mostly fine, but…sometimes, there are one or two that say something, and—like my dream of dying, remember how I said that I sometimes see who kills me? I try to not remember, because when I’m awake and trying to do friendly things, sometimes the memories come back and scare me, but…it was one of my friends. She’s…always the one in my nightmares. And when I’m with her now, even though I’m fine, and she’s never done anything to hurt me in real life, the dreams make me not like her as much, or to blame her for things she hasn’t really done.”

The tar pit of bad dreams has reached critical mass. All the shit you’ve been consistently repressing since childhood boils over and makes you stare them in the face. And it’s really one face you’re staring at, when it all comes down to it. You tongue feels dry. “Yeah,” you say, because there’s no going back anymore. You’re here, this is your life, and it’s time to look your demons in the face and sort shit out. Maybe cry a little bit while it’s dark and no one else is around but Tavros, who…maybe doesn’t count as much in terms of the tough kid façade front. “I have dreams like that about my brother.”

“Your brother?” he repeats. He turns his big, nocturnal eyes on you, like he’s getting ready to discuss a sensitive topic with you. You hate that he thinks this is going to be a sensitive topic, because he’s getting his facts from the ‘before’ you in the mythical pre-history you shared, and that confirms everything your nightmares have been trying to tell you for years now. “You mean, your custodian?”

“He’s not my custodian,” you say. “We’re just brothers. We’re close. He’s cool. We hang out.”

“But…in your nightmares…”

You take in a deep breath. “Sometimes, when he comes up behind me and I don’t notice him coming, I feel…like I’m going to get attacked,” you say. “In my nightmares, I do. He kicks the shit out of my weak ass and leaves me to deal with the aftermath alone, and I fucking hate it. I hate those dreams. And when I wake up and go to the kitchen for breakfast, and he’s there munching down on some Cheerios or whatever, I can’t…shake the feeling that I’m supposed to be on some kind of high alert, to sneak around and test for traps and be on guard at all times. Like I’m gonna turn around and he’s gonna jump me. And then I feel guilty because what the hell has he ever done to me to deserve that sort of caution? We’re bros. We’re cool.” You inhale, trying to push back the flood of shitty emotions that you let loose. Tavros’s eyes are still on you, probing but sympathetic. He weaves his fingers into yours a little more completely.

“Uh…when I think about you, and how you were about your Bro before, when, uh…when I really knew you…I think the way you describe him and your feelings for him now makes sense,” he says. “Because…um…”

“Because I keep snacks in my closet in case there’s no food in the fridge,” you say. “There’s always food in the fridge now, by the way. I only horde after a nightmare.”

“Does your brother know that you feel this way at all?”

You exhale through your nose. “No,” you say. “I mean, does your friend know how you feel about her after a nightmare?”

“No,” he says. “But, if it makes you feel better, I share similar experiences. For instance, I still get scared of heights, because of my dreams, even though…those things have never happened to me before. In this life, I mean.”

“In this life,” you repeat. So now you’re talking in terms of previous lives. “What are we even supposed to be? Reincarnated lovers, lost to the sands of time only to find each other in a fucking record shop of all places?”

Tavros lets out a small laugh. “I think, all things considered, a record shop is the best place for us to meet, if your proposed scenario is the right one.”

You look down at him, and even though you’re both obviously still wading in the deep, dark feelings you finally let loose after all this time, he smiles up at you. He’s wrapped up in your sheets, and your room is dark and as quiet as it ever gets in the city, the orange glow of the streetlamps outside projecting a window-shaped square onto your ceiling. Outside, heat lightning flickers behind the buildings far in the distance. You sit back and snuggle down into your bed next to him, and a dim memory of the first time you both slept in the same bed floats at the back of your mind. “We gotta figure this bullshit out,” you say. “Get everything straight and squared away, put the lock and key on these nightmares, uncover the mystery of our dark, secret past...maybe make a better mixtape.”

“I think, objectively speaking, previous life me was a better rapper, so we’ll have to see about that,” Tavros says. You smile, and you swear you can see his eyes light up.

“Yeah, we’ll see,” you say, and you almost work up the nerve to kiss him.


	8. Time Has Brought Your Heart to Me

The minute Tav leaves the next morning, you haul ass to the oracle. The waiting room is full, so you take the time to gather your thoughts and figure out exactly what it is you want to say. If all your experiences weren’t confirmed by another person, you would feel out of your mind trying to put everything into words. Previous lives? Multiple Daves? Glowing green dogs with swords? Calamari monsters? Hell, if anyone tried to convince you that they lived through the same sort of shit you’re about to try to convince someone else you lived through, you’d fucking laugh. Or cut ties and run. But here you are, trying to group all of the little epiphanies you’ve been having into some sort of believable narrative that doesn’t make you sound like a raving lunatic. When it’s finally your turn for a consultation, you’re not completely sure anymore that’s not exactly what you are.

rose  
hey before you send aradia over can i ask you a question

“Hello, Dave,” Rose says over the microphone. “You may.”

so when you say youre not my rose  
you meant that literally right  
like you are literally a different rose  
a second rose

“That’s correct,” she responds without missing a beat. Like it’s a perfectly reasonable and not at all bizarre answer.

okay so  
are there more than two of you

“Yes,” she says in exactly the same breezy tone.

and  
theres more than one of me too right  
like potentially a fuck ton of dave striders exist somewhere out there

“Are you beginning to remember?” she asks, almost playfully.

yeah i guess  
im still getting there though so treat me gently okay  
this is a fucking lot to handle  
where are they all  
theyre not in new dallas i wouldve seen them around  
lets be real theres no way more than one dave could live in one city without literally every other dave honing in on their existence  
we cant all be the eccentric mastermind behind sweet bro and hella jeff so some kind of battle of the daves would have to go down

“You are the only Dave on that particular planet at this point in time,” Rose says. “Does that answer your question?”

i mean it doesnt not answer it but it sure doesnt lay my curiosity to rest  
if they arent here where are they

“They are strewn across the universe on habitable planets populated by beings we planted there at the dawn of time, delivered upon meteors in much the same fashion we were first delivered to Earth before the game.”

uh  
okay cool

“Dave, do you remember the details concerning how all these Daves came to exist?”

no  
maybe  
shit i dont know  
not well enough to understand whatever you just said

“That’s what I thought. You may want to clear that up before you ask anything more about that particular topic. I’m sending Aradia to you.”

wait rose  
cant we just talk about it  
why are you always sending aradia  
were friends right  
are we friends in your version of reality or

“We are friends,” Rose responds calmly, like she’s answered this question many times before. “But while my abilities go a long way, Aradia is the only one among us who has met most if not all of you. She knows what sets you apart from every other iteration of yourself, thanks to her work with the dead in the dreambubbles. She can help you, Dave. Trust her. I’m sending her over.”

Your mind wraps around the phrase ‘dead in the dreambubbles’ before a bright light fills the room. Aradia steps down from the platform. “You’ve come a long way since I last saw you!” she says. “How are you feeling, Dave?”

“’Dreambubbles,’” you repeat. “Those are the bubbles. The calamari monster bubbles, with the people in them.”

“Yes!”

“Holy shit. And…”

“And?”

You sigh and push your shades up to message your eye sockets. “The dead.”

“The dead?”

The line across your throat stings. You remember Tavros with white eyes. “Okay, can we make this as easy as possible?” you ask, feeling exhausted. You’re pretty certain no one person should have to deal with this many existential crises over the span of a couple of days. It can’t be good for your health. Shit’s probably shaving days off your life.

“You can take a seat if you want,” Aradia says, pointing to what may be the most uncomfortable looking chair in the entire world. How gracious. You shove your hands into your jeans and ball them into fists.

“I’m good,” you say. “So. What I’ve been able to gather is that we’ve lived a previous life, died, and now we’re here by some yet unexplained twist of fate. That’s the gist of it, right?”

“Go on,” Aradia says, her grin widening.

“I was killed by an overpowered mutt wielding a sword.”

“Yes!” she says with an ironic amount of delight over such a morbid topic. You guess you can appreciate that. “I was there when you woke up. Do you remember?”

You pause and think. You do vaguely remember. You also remember… “That’s when I met Tavros,” you say.

“And?”

“And we lived together in the dream bubbles, until…”

“Until?”

“Fuck,” you say, closing your eyes. Oblivion presses down on you. Cracks of color dance at the back of your head. The horror of nonexistence, that terrible emptiness of everything falling apart, blasts against your brain, blooming into a dull headache. You don’t want to remember. It brings back the grief that hurts you so bad. “Can we talk about something else for now?” you ask.

“Of course,” Aradia says immediately. “What do you want to know?”

You exhale and try to concentrate on something else. “The lava. With the gears.”

“The Land of Heat and Clockwork,” Aradia supplies for you. Your heart thuds. It explodes into your mind in imax 3D, and you’re there, wearing an ugly lime green suit that you made. Your apartment building towers over you, reaching up to a portal in the sky. Someone is blowing up your phone with shitty gif images. And there is a veritable army of you running around, half of them doing stuff you’ve done already and the other half doing things you know you’ll have to do in order to not die. Which you failed spectacularly. You glance at the icon on Aradia’s magical pajamas.

“I was the time guy,” you remember. “But not the one who was good at time, because I fucked up and doomed myself.”

“Thanks in part to Terezi,” Aradia says. Terezi. You file the name back. “Do you remember the game now, Dave?”

The game. “Refresh my memory,” you say. “Just lay a bunch of names on me. That seems to work pretty well.”

She nods. “Sburb. Skaia. Prospit. Derse. The Land of Wind and Shade. Light and Rain. Frost and Frogs. The Furthest Ring. The Green Sun. Bec Noir. Lord English.”

“Okay, stop,” you say, reeling. So many images and impressions that have been churning just below your conscious mind fly up to smack you in the figurative face with memories. Some of them aren’t half bad. And some of them…you remember a battlefield, covered in ghosts and sand. The cracks glow above you. A small green dot far away in the middle of the Furthest Ring explodes into a massive black hole, and it begins to suck everything in. You look to your side, to Tavros, and the cracks dance in his dead, white eyes. And it all falls apart. Everything falls the fuck apart. Including you. Including Tavros. It’s all gone. It’s all fucking gone.

You gasp. You reach back for the chair and slump into it, cradling your head, tears blurring your vision. It’s all gone. Your life. Your afterlife. You remember the fond, safe feeling of eternity spanning in front of you like a utopian promise, only to shatter around you, leaving you stuck alone in that hideous purgatory of oblivion. Until you woke up here, clueless, with only Dirk for company, and it was like none of it ever happened.

Aradia watches you with a gentle, sympathetic expression, like she’s seen this exact meltdown a hundred times before.

“What happened?” you ask her as soon as you can choke out words. “Why am I here? The game…”

“We won,” she says. “We beat Lord English and created a new universe. That’s where we are now.”

“This is the new universe?”

“Yes.”

“But…fuck.” You feel like shit. You feel like worse than shit. You have never in your life, at least the more recent one, felt this shitty. “But I lost. I _died_.”

“Yes, you did,” she says.

“So why am _I_ here?”

“What other outcome did you expect?”

You don’t know. Actual real death? “So, what, all the doomed players get a sick slice of the winnings, even though we sucked?”

Aradia hums thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she says. “It was a game. No one can live forever in a game, dead or alive. You may not have won the game yourself, but you were an important step in the path to winning, just like every other doomed player who tested the boundaries of the game mechanics and fell victim to the trial and error of gameplay. In the end, doomed or successful, you were a player, and all players get to leave the game. Just not always as a winner.”

A dull, numb ache settles in your limbs. “So I’m alive because, what, the game just spat out everyone who wasn’t a game element at the end? This life is just me putting down my controller and walking away from the console to reintegrate with the IRL population that has bills to pay and errands to run?”

“If that’s how you want to think about it,” she says. “Those of us who won have reaped the rewards of the game. We’re gods. We get to live forever and overseer the affairs of our domain as we see fit. But the doomed players…”

“We get to lick our wounds and eat dirt on the planets y’all made for us in your vast universe,” you say.

“Is it really so bad?”

Is it? Yeah. Yeah, it’s the fucking _worst_. What happened to your dream bubble, with the life you made in death? What happened to your post-mortem paradise? What happened to your eternity? What happened to your Tavros? How are you supposed to live like this, knowing what you do now about what you were and what you had?

“Would it have really been too much to ask for the game to do a guy a solid and let us just bum around for a while longer?” you ask, hyperaware of every drop falling from your face with Aradia’s eyes trained on you. “We weren’t taking up that much fucking space, were we? Shit, I could’ve paid some rent to the horrorterrors if that’s what they wanted. We got rid of Lord English for them, you’d think there’d be a little more gratitude there.”

“Dave,” Aradia says, and she waits for you to glance up at her. “There was no future in the game. The dream bubbles were all made of the past. You remember that, right? You can’t build a future in death out of the scraps of your living memories. But you’re alive now! You can have a real future, and you can have it with someone you love very much. Isn’t that something you could want? To me, it sounds very lucky.”

You drop your eyes. You think about it. Even though you’re drowning in the miserable nostalgia of memories you just gained back, choking on the loss of something you held so fucking dear it’s crushing your heart to pulp, you can feel somewhere under all that a dim light. Not like some ‘second star to the right everything is fine and Neverland is yours for the taking’ kind of light, but like the somber glow that happens at dawn before the sun actually breaks over the horizon. Like when you wake up way too goddamn early and you still hate everything a little bit, but you know that feeling doesn’t have to last the whole day. You swallow. “We’re mortal,” you say. “It’s all gonna end someday.”

“Didn’t it already end once?” Aradia says.

“I don’t think I can do it again.”

“You won’t have to. There are no redos this time around.” You look up at her, and she smiles. “So you’ll have to really make it count this time around, won’t you? Make sure you don’t take anything for granted.”

Don’t take anything for granted. No one needs to tell you that twice.


	9. I Have Loved You For a Thousand Years

TG: tav  
TG: tavros  
TG: are you busy  
TG: do you have to work today  
TG: i have some mission critical info that needs immediate briefing when youve got a moment  
TG: preferably more than a moment because lets be honest  
TG: this shit is fucking bananas and youre gonna want to sit down and throw back a drink after its all laid out  
TG: which is coincidentally what i did last night  
TG: dont tell rose  
TG: do you know who rose is

AT: hI DAVE,  
AT: uH, i AM ACTUALLY WORKING TODAY, bUT i’LL BE DONE AT A REASONABLE HOUR PROBABLY,  
AT: sHOULD i COME TO YOUR APARTMENT WHEN i’M DONE,

TG: yeah do that  
TG: or wait should i come to your place this time  
TG: i keep summoning your ass to the city without showing the basic courtesy of asking you where the fuck you even live

AT: nO, iT’S FINE, sINCE i’M AT THE ZOO AGAIN TODAY,  
AT: sO i’M ALREADY IN THE CITY ANYWAY,

He sends you an adorable and somewhat nerve-wracking selfie with an enormous polar bear, which you promptly file away on your phone for later ogling. You reiterate the importance of him coming to your location immediately pronto as soon possible a few more times and let him get back to work. Your head buzzes as you sit down and wait. You had a long, unflattering mental odyssey last night taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together, a lot of which involved hastily scribbled raps, doodles, vodka, and a few unsuccessful attempts to use the bathroom without alerting Dirk to the fact that you’re a complete wreck of a human being who hasn’t figured out how to deal with yourself. You’d think that synthesizing your identity with your newly discovered previous identity would be cake, but it’s not. It’s not cake. Not even cupcakes, or the cheapo kind of cheat cake you can make in a mug with the microwave. You remember your life then, and you remember your life now, and you remember the nonexistence purgatory that created the jarring rift between the two, but you can’t decide if you’re supposed to resume your identity as Dave Strider #3957, Doomed Hero of Time, factoring your life now into the equation as one solid, inalienable experience, one paradoxically linear Dave Strider timeline, all part of your big life adventure, or if you’re supposed to keep your identity as Dave Strider, Ironic Internetainer, reincarnation of a guy from another life who took part in the creation of the universe, but that’s all over and that Dave Strider ain’t the same dude as who you are now, since you reset the clock and started over from scratch. And how does all the rest of everything fit into it? What about Tavros? What about John, Jade, Rose? What about Dirk, if he’s the same guy he was before but also…not, obviously?

You shake your head and put on the mixtape you made with Tavros. You remember the whole process now. Your memories are pulling themselves together little by little, one thing shedding light on the other until they all grow gradually sharper. They grind against your other memories from this life. How crazy is it to remember two completely different childhoods? The contrast makes your gut squeeze.

Maybe the issue is that you have so many more memories from then than you do from now. The time or lack thereof you spent in the dream bubbles eclipses everything else in terms of sheer volume of memories. It’s like your first childhood was thirteen years of experiences, and then your dream bubble period lasted for a veritable fuckin’ lifetime and then some with what feels like hundreds of years of adventures and events and common little occurrences that you can still feel engrained in the fabric of your soul, and then you had another quaint twenty-something years of trite basic dude bullshit. At the same time, the post-mortem period still feels so dream-like and unattainable, like it’s you but way impossible to be you. Can you really stake the bulk of your identity on the time you spent literally dead? It’s not like you’re ever going to recreate a reality where you can live out that side of yourself again.

You know you shouldn’t be clinging to it like this. Aradia was right that you can’t make a future out of the past, can’t live in memories of shifting memories. You’re Ironic Internetainer Dave Strider now, trite basic dude extraordinaire, no time powers, no dream lands, no mystic shit or magic shenanigans. That’s your future.

And then you’re back to square one: can you even consider Dave Strider, Hero of Time, an aspect of what you are now, if what he was is something you can’t be?

 Tavros shows up in the middle of the afternoon when the air in your apartment is about as unbearable as it gets, and you’ve worked yourself into enough of an existential mess to sprawl limply across Dirk’s lowered futon like a sweaty, overcooked noodle with _Donnie Darko_ playing in the background. You shut the TV off when he opens the door, almost like he’s forgotten that it’s not really his house. As far as you’re concerned, he could paint one of the walls his favorite color and hang up a “Home Sweet Home” sign.

“Yo,” you say as he walks on in. “Want an AJ?”

“Uh,” he says, eyeing you with a raised eyebrow. “Are you okay?”

“No. Want an AJ?”

“Why aren’t you okay?”

“A magical fairy revealed to me the secrets of the universe. Here, I’ll get you an AJ. It’s hot out.”

He takes the AJ from you and promptly returns it back to your hand when you shut the fridge. “I think you need this more than I do,” he says. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“AJ.”

“Are you…okay?”

You sigh. You kind of fucked yourself over by overthinking everything, and now you have no idea where to start with him. You don’t know what to say. You have too much to say. “Do you remember yet?” you ask. You realize as soon as you say it that you sound just like everyone else now, all ‘Have you figured it out?’ like that’s helpful in any way. You kind of want to punch yourself in the face.

“Remember…as in, the things we were discussing, concerning the evils and our mutual past lives?”

“Yes, as in those things. Do you remember the game?”

“The game?” he repeats. “Uhh…um…the game.”

You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know how to best guide him to enlightenment. If you’re honest with yourself, you don’t really wanna watch him go through the revelation the way you did. You don’t want to watch him break down as the pieces click together. But you’re full of urgency, too, because what he remembers and how he deals with it directly affects you. Because if he decides that Tavros, Hero of Breath, isn’t who he is now, and you aren’t Dave Strider, Hero of Time, then what happens? If you aren’t the two people who lived together in a shifting dream death half-reality, what are you?

“Sburb,” you say. “Or Sgrub, whatever. The game. We died. Remember? I was the time guy, and you were the breath dude. My session created Bec Noir, the terrifying dog monster, who came and fucked up your session, and you were on a meteor trolling us through the entirety of our session until we both kicked the proverbial bucket—not sexually, but—fuck—I mean, there was that, too, when we were—do you remember? Do you remember that? Do you remember, like…us? There was a whole huge span of time when we were chillin’ together, livin’ it up, here and sometimes in your hive, and the bubble was always hitting other bubbles to make new places to check out. Remember? And then Lord English shat all over paradox space, broke a perfect circle into the Furthest Ring, and we faced off with him in the final battle, when the Green Sun spaghetti’d into a black hole and everything fell apart? Everything we made together—do you remember?”

You register that you’ve overwhelmed him by a long shot, but you’re too fucked up to do a damn thing about it, too busy fumbling too many things to think about and feel and explain. You take his hands as he stumbles over words, everything catching in his throat before he can make a coherent utterance, and you hope behind those wide, distressed eyes, it’s all coming together again. You hope the tears are for the memories, for what he’s lost. For you. Does he remember you? Does he remember what you were? What you meant? What you built? Does he remember loving you? All of it?

“Do you remember?”

He finally nods. “It’s…I don’t know…what happened?”

“They made a new universe,” you explain. “We’re outside the game now. It kicked us out because we were players. Fuck, I don’t know. Here, sit down.”

You take him to the futon and hand him the AJ again. He actually drinks it this time. You rub his back as he processes. It took you hours to get anywhere. You’re still processing. Memories are still coalescing. But, fuck, you want to talk to him about it. You want to talk so bad. You can’t stand waiting for him to catch up to you. So, in true Dave Strider fashion, as elegantly tactful as you are, you start to ramble. You can’t help it. You run through memories, through visions that have resurfaced and become clearer by the hour. “There was that one time we ran into your ancestor and had that fiduspawn tournament,” and “Remember when one of Feferi’s bubbles collided with ours and the apartment was wet for what felt like weeks,” and “Between all the Nepetas we saw, we managed to solve all the puzzles on LOLCAT.”

Memories. Memories and memories. But the Tav you knew was scared of heights. He spent time paralyzed. He grew up thinking all these troll culture things about murder and hierarchies and being strong. And the Dave Tav knew had the shittiest childhood, complete with the horror puppet from hell. And when you recite your memories, those differences are sometimes clear as fucking crystal. You aren’t those people. But you are. But you aren’t. Fuck.

“Tavros,” you say, stumbling to a stop.

“Hmm?” he says. The both of you are laying back on the futon, sprawled across it like you were before he came. He’s not crying anymore. He even laughed now and then while you talked. But you can tell he’s still in the thick of it. You exhale slowly.

“We’re not the same people,” you say. “It’s all gone.”

“…Mm,” he says. It’s like an almost physical weight is pressing down on both of you suddenly. The air is so hot and stuffy. You wipe sweat from your forehead.

“I don’t even know you. I just met you. We just met each other a couple of days ago.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Everything has changed. This life is nothing like all that. It’s all…gone.”

“Yeah.”

“Might as well be a fever dream. A drug-induced hallucination. No one would believe any of it. We’re just two average joes making our way through life now. We’ve got jobs, kind of. We go shopping for shit we need. We have to clean our own toilets. It’s just another day in the life. Can’t even fly anymore. How unfair is that?” He doesn’t respond. Your mouth feels dry. You swallow. “Can I have some of that AJ?”

He passes it over to you, and you gulp down as much as you can stomach, which isn’t much. You’re both quiet. You lay next to each other and stare up at the ceiling, and it feels achingly familiar. You blink some tears out of your eyes. He sniffs. The light grows gold with the waning hours.

He breaks the silence. “Do you…want to?” he asks.

“…What?”

“Know me, I mean. Know each other. Uh, even though we aren’t the same people as we were then, with our pasts and our development, and all the things that we had together are gone forever, and we don’t really know each other anymore, do you…want to do things together anyway? Could we…get to know each other again, and, um…maybe, could we…?”

“Yes,” you say immediately. You’re pretty sure this doesn’t solve anything about yourself or who you are now or who you were then or what you’re supposed to be anymore, and you know you have no idea how Tavros is dealing with any of those issues, but it doesn’t matter. You can figure that out later. You’re both still processing, after all. But this…you really needed to hear this. And to say it. “Yeah. Definitely. For sure. Sign me up.”

“So…are we…?”

“Yes. If you’re down, I’m down. If I’m your guy, you’re my guy.”

He laughs, a little wet laugh, and after a short pause, he says, “Thanks. For letting me a part of your life again.”

And it hits you like a fucking wrecking ball. A very particular memory from the beginning of the end of your afterlife blindsides you and leaves you gasping. ‘Thanks.’ Fucking ‘ _thanks_.’ You sit up and gape at him, and he smiles up at you, his glossy eyes all warmth and affection and joy, like he _knows_ exactly what he just did to you. Your breath catches. You wrap your hand around his head and kiss him.

Yeah, okay. Thanks. You know what? That sounds good right now. Maybe that’s exactly the right word for how you feel. Maybe the start of never taking anything for granted again is the word ‘Thanks.’


	10. I'll Love You For a Thousand More

TG: hey rose

TT: Yes?

TG: have you written a self help book for people who remember they were almost gods once and are now stuck with all their secret reincarnation epiphanies  
TG: like do they cover that sort of thing in any of your psychology tomes

TT: No, there’s an unfortunate lack of material on reincarnation and the psychology of those who survive the universe’s end and recreation through mythic gameplay.  
TT: Which is why I and several iterations of myself have taken up the burden and begun an intergalactic collaboration to document our findings and proposed treatment.

TG: wait really

TT: It’s a work in progress.

TG: well here i was trying to play down a dramatic reveal about my personal revelations and youre already tackling your shit at a cosmic scale  
TG: have john and jade figured it out yet

TT: Jade has.  
TT: In fact, I think she was the first of us to remember.  
TT: Do you recall how, before the game, she used to provide us with cryptic messages about the future that always seemed to be eerily well-informed?

TG: yeah  
TG: but she never  
TG: wait  
TG: oh fuck  
TG: are you kidding me  
TG: i thought she was just talking about some sort of weird asian tv show thats popular on her side of the world  
TG: she knew this whole time and she just sat around giggling about it i cant even believe

TT: I think it’s fittingly ironic that, instead of providing silly hints to the future, she spent this lifetime slipping us small reminders of the past.  
TT: Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the situation is that we were much more likely to notice her pre-game premonitions than we were to recognize her sly allusions to our shared memories.  
TT: But I suppose it’s easier to notice something that actually happens than it is to delve into our unconscious minds for dormant recollections of a previous life.

TG: yeah maybe  
TG: im more or less entirely positive now that i spent most of my life actively avoiding anything that reminded me of the game  
TG: maybe the answer to the mystery of our ignorance is our own obstinate rejection of unintelligible bullshit

TT: Well said.  
TT: In any case, she should be the next person you contact about your ‘personal relevations.’  
TT: She would be happy to chat with you about it.  
TT: As for John…  
TT: I’m not sure he’ll ever figure it out.

TG: haha yeah he can be a little slow on the uptake

TT: And surprisingly adapt at repressing thoughts and memories he finds difficult to manage.  
TT: It’s a shame.  
TT: He would be impressed with his godself.

TG: is that what were calling them now  
TG: our godselves

TT: It has a nice ring.

TG: youve met yours right  
TG: when you went to the oracle

TT: Yes.  
TT: Although I can recall having the powers of a Seer of Light from my own in-game experiences, I can no longer use them.  
TT: It’s interesting and a little nostalgic to talk with a version of me who can.  
TT: She’s fairly amenable to any requests I have for information that take advantage of her abilities.  
TT: Needless to say, she’s an invaluable resource for our book.

TG: she never did chat with me much  
TG: she always just sent over aradia

TT: You have to understand that she’s very busy.  
TT: The universe is vast, and there are many, many Daves vying for her attention in a very Dave-like way.  
TT: In fact, if I understand the situation correctly, there are more iterations of you than there are of anyone else, save for Aradia, who is also a time player, and perhaps Dirk.  
TT: Your habit of reproducing and splintering yourselves has produced an imbalanced ratio between you and your peers.  
TT: The unfortunate consequence is that there are many, many lonely Daves who have been stranded from their loved ones.

TG: holy shit really  
TG: thats about the saddest thing i ever heard  
TG: wait that applies to dirk too

TT: Yes.  
TT: He’s told me in confidence that he believes himself to be very, very lucky.  
TT: How is Dirk, by the way?  
TT: Have you come out to him about your self-discovery yet?

TG: yeah  
TG: it was a whole thing  
TG: im surprised he hasnt told you about it

TT: He has.  
TT: I was hoping to pry some juicy gossip from your own clammy, sensitive hands for a change.

TG: wow rude  
TG: i mean what do you want me to say about it  
TG: i grew up with him i knew he was cool  
TG: i didnt know anything about his post-death experiences or anything like that but why would i  
TG: i didnt even remember my own experiences until just a while ago and i had a good enough reason to avoid him in the dream bubbles  
TG: so the conversation was just stilted and awkward at this point  
TG: i dont know obviously i forgave him just by virtue of liking him when i grew up with him  
TG: its astounding what a lack of a demon hell puppet can do to a household

TT: I wouldn’t downplay his own work on the matter.  
TT: Or yours.

TG: mine  
TG: you mean like dying and coming back to life with a clean slate or

TT: Word on the street is that Dirk had his revelation at a very young age and that your own godself worked with him to help him figure things out.  
TT: Does that sound like something you would do, Dave?

TG: shit  
TG: i dont know

TT: Apparently your godself and Dirk’s godself get along famously.  
TT: Dirk just needed some guidance and support.  
TT: Given the success of the system our godselves created to assist us lesser beings, that seems the case with all of us.

TG: yeah probably  
TG: if i hadnt gone to the oracle id probably still be a fucking mess  
TG: good service 10/10  
TG: okay actually im gonna give it an 8/10 because sometimes a straight answer is all a guy needs

TT: About that.  
TT: Is there anything else you want to tell me about your life?  
TT: Anything new and special?

TG: what

TT: Something that most people would consider somewhat important for their friends to know?  
TT: A critical part of your reawakening?

TG: like what  
TG: what are you talking about

TT: You’re being obtuse on purpose.

TG: i would never

TT: Dirk informed me the other day that he came home to find you making out with a troll on his futon.  
TT: Very passionately, if his account is anything to go by.

TG: now thats just scandalous  
TG: do i seem like the kind of guy who would make out with a troll on his brothers ratty futon

TT: Dirk also informs me that this troll was the source of the breakdown that took you to the oracle in the first place.

TG: god what a fucking snitch  
TG: yeah okay  
TG: it was tavros  
TG: you remember him right  
TG: i dont know how much you bumped into us in the bubbles or which rose you were out of the thousands of doomed roses we came across but we were a thing  
TG: weve been dating for both a million years and a week and a half since yesterday

TT: Congratulations.

TG: here you wanna see a picture

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] shared file tavros1.jpg with tentacleTherapist [TT] --

TT: Is that a polar bear?

TG: haha yeah he works with animals

TT: Nice.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] shared file cutedate44.jpg with turntechGodhead [TG] --

TG: holy shit  
TG: so you found your kanaya

TT: Of course.  
TT: I made it a priority.  
TT: Not everyone is as lucky as we are to find our significant others and rekindle our relationships.  
TT: We should count ourselves among the privileged few.

TG: trust me i know

TT: Would you like to see a few more pictures?  
TT: Our last date was especially charming.

TG: are we picture swapping now  
TG: do i have to start taking more sappy couple pictures

TT: Aren’t you the one with the professed interest in photography?

TG: is that a challenge

TT: You may consider it one, if you don’t want your photographs totally eclipsed by the sheer artistry that is my spectacular troll girlfriend.

TG: its on  
TG: prepare yourself for some polaroid roasting

TT: Are you going to post any of them online?  
TT: Your poor adoring fans will be heartbroken to discover you’ve found your long lost soulmate from a previous life.

TG: well file that under shit theyll just have to learn how to deal with  
TG: but actually i dont know yet  
TG: i havent told john or jade  
TG: no one but you and dirk knows so far

TT: Then be subtle about it.  
TT: At first.  
TT: Allow them to come into the realization slowly.

TG: hahaha yeah  
TG: hey guys this is me and my bro tavros  
TG: drinking out of the same milkshake with two straws  
TG: just bros being dudes  
TG: heres a picture of us hugging under the eiffel tower  
TG: here we are feeding each other grapes on a whimsical boat ride surrounded by some monet level lily pads and flowers and shit  
TG: this is us cutting the cake at our wedding  
TG: good bro best dude

TT: It sounds like just the ironic masterpiece your Internet personality needs.

TG: rose youre a genius  
TG: hey ill get back to you in a bit  
TG: im feeling pretty freakin romantic all a sudden  
TG: got some picturesque but ambiguous dates to plan

TT: Let me know if you need a brainstorming partner.  
TT: I would be pleased to assist.

TG: will do

You put away your phone and pick up your camera gear on your way out the door. You’re going to Tavros’s hive tonight for a change. You don’t get out of the city often, but you’re hoping there will be plenty of grass and maybe a few lightning bugs to really bring the night together. It’ll mark your first opportunity in this life for you to wrestle Tavros’s socks off his feet and get him to run around barefoot with you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that marks the end of this fic! Thanks for reading, and I hope you had a good time with it!
> 
> [A parting song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-MBfn8XjIU)


End file.
